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In the first week of GameStop’s newly launched NFT market, the NiFTy Arcade collection stood out from the pack. Instead of offering basic JPEGs, the collection provided “interactive NFTs” tied to HTML5 games that were fully playable from an owner’s crypto wallet (or from the GameStop Marketplace site itself).
There was just one problem: Many of these NFT games were minted and sold without the permission of the creators, much less any arrangement for the creators to share in crypto profits.
While the man behind NiFTy Arcade has since been suspended from GameStop’s NFT marketplace, he is still holding on to tens of thousands of dollars in cryptocurrency that he earned by selling those NFTs prior to the suspension. And while the NFTs in question are no longer listed on the GameStop NFT Marketplace, the unlicensed games themselves can still be accessed on GameStop’s servers and across a blockchain-based file storage system, where they may now be functionally impossible to remove.
How about an arcade but with NFTs?
NiFTy Arcade creator Nathan Ello told Ars that his collection grew out of a desire to “highlight potential use cases for NFTs beyond static images.” But Ello got a little abstract when asked to explain the utility of newly minted NFT versions of games that were already freely playable elsewhere online.
“If people find value in these NFTs, that’s a bonus, but my intention is to create and showcase games that can be played in NFT marketplaces and within NFT wallets,” he told Ars. “Should anyone want the convenience of playing the game directly from their wallet or their own marketplace profile page without having to navigate to mine, they are welcome to purchase a copy.”
Ello ended up selling hundreds of NFTs based on the NiFTy Arcade collection’s first three games, earning at least 46.7 ETH (worth roughly $55,000 at the time) from those sales as of July 15th. But for at least two of these games—Worm Nom Nom and Galactic Wars— Ello admitted that he never sought the necessary permission from the original creators before selling them. It is also proof that Ello branded and distributed a number of other games through NFT marketplaces without the creators’ permission, i.a. Breakout Hero, Super Disc boxand Intruder Overload, according to Joseph “Lexaloffle” White, creator of the PICO-8 pixel game engine.
