GameStop’s new NFT marketplace is the top of the blockchain bloat

This week marks the official launch of GameStop’s NFT marketplace and a new direction for the mainstay of the meme stock, even despite a failing market for all things cryptocurrency.

The seeds of an OpenSea competitor were sown earlier this year after the company – high on its own smoke from the meme stock decadence – decided that the NFT market was the next big investment.

In terms of the marketplace, the beta offers an interface that works in the same way as OpenSea in that users have the opportunity to explore a number of NFT projects for sale, with a set of selected collections on both the home and explorer pages.

Some small differences – GameStop’s NFT marketplace looks like an OpenSea clone, but there are some minor differences. While it is important to reiterate that this platform is still in beta, GameStop’s marketplace currently lacks some features in OpenSea – namely the ability to view trading activity or sales data for NFT collections.

My guess would be that this information will eventually be introduced when more people have joined the platform, although it will do little to fix the quality (or lack thereof) of NFTs available on the site.

Like Meta and Reddit, GameStop has introduced a feature that allows artists to apply to be creators on the platform and create their own projects for the site. The hope here is to draw in people with a kind of following or notoriety, so that they can bring further traffic to the market.

But while Meta and Reddit are trying to convert NFT enthusiasts into more users of their social media platforms, GameStop’s endgame seems to strengthen its digital compilation platform.

A conspicuous omission from the beta is a dedicated space for blockchain games and NFTs in the game, which will probably come with the official launch. You can imagine that a company like GameStop, which has the task of understanding its consumer base (players of all kinds), would be able to see that the average player has no interest in NFT affiliations, but I guess the lid with the next big NFT marketplace is too strong to ignore.

Ultimately, the result is gentle at best and unnecessary at worst. Still, the urge to double down on what may well be this decade’s dot-com bubble persists, even when the timing is far less than ideal.