Sclerotic Funko Pop retailer GameStop continues its poor NFT marketplace despite a series of embarrassments. Less than two weeks after news broke that their service was hosting an NFT “adaptation” of a famous photo of a 9/11 victim (opens in a new tab) falls to its death, an Ars Technica report (opens in a new tab) has revealed that the GameStop NFT marketplace facilitated the sale of unauthorized NFT copies of indie games.
An individual named Nathan Ello released the NiFTy Arcade collection on GameStop’s marketplace, earning 8.4 ETH (about $14,000) in initial sales. Ello definitely did not have permission to use at least two of these games in his project, and it also appears, but is not certain, that he was not authorized to use three more games included in NiFTy Arcade. Additionally, Ello did not have a license to use the PICO-8 engine used in all five games.
Ultimately, NiFTy Arcade was pulled from the GameStop marketplace and Ello’s account was suspended, but the diffuse nature of NFTs means that users can still access their copies of these unlicensed games, and their creators may have no recourse. Ello offered to compensate the developers harmed by NiFTy Arcade, and has since revived the project on another marketplace with a promise that future games will be “in proper compliance with all the terms of service of the NFT marketplace.”
This story is yet another example of the shady behavior facilitated by NFT marketplaces. In the summer of 2021, NFTs that ensure artists’ “ownership” of their work have quickly given way to a reality where their work is often exploited against their will. This is all while the NFTs themselves continue to offer no concrete benefits or use cases beyond profit generation, as Brazilian developer Mark Venturelli so eloquently stated in his talk at the Brazil International Games Festival (opens in a new tab) last month. This isn’t even the first case of NFT creators turning existing games into blockchain tokens, with MetaGravity’s Retro Arcade Collection (opens in a new tab) offers this treatment to a selection of older, bigger-budget games.
It’s especially abhorrent to see this spiritually lethal NFT nonsense from GameStop parties when you remember that the company recently laid off a significant number of employees (opens in a new tab)including some of our peers at the long-running video game magazine Game Informer.
