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The stock price of GameStop (GME), a famous video game retailer, jumped over 13% in one day amid online speculations of a deal with Microsoft to work on NFT gaming. According to TradingView data, GME is currently trading at $115.60 as of market close on February 8 and has also remained around that level in after-hours trading. GME began February near $100 and has been surging this month as a result of GameStop's partnership with Immutable X. Immutable X is an NFT-focused Layer-2 Ethereum scaling solution to construct its future NFT marketplace. GameStop is also launching a $100 million grant program for NFT content creators and tech innovators in IMX tokens as part of the agreement. According to recent reports circulating on Reddit and Twitter, GameStop and Microsoft may collaborate to provide NFT integrations into existing games as well as develop new NFT-focused games. While the specific nature of the three parties' relationship is unknown, a Feb. 6 post on the r/Superstonk Reddit community detailed noteworthy speculation of what the cooperation could involve. A Reddit user named Bamfcoco1 claimed that Hearthstone's dropping users from about 23.5 million to 3.5 million was due to the high expenses of card collection and a lack of actual ownership over the user's assets. Both of these problems could be addressed with NFT integrations:
“With the ability to freely mint and trade NFTs on Immutable X’s platform, it’s a no brainer. GameStop could launch Hearthstone on their brand new Web3 platform by simply making an NFT for every card and then distributing them accordingly to users’ existing card collections. It’s about as easy as it would get.”
Web3 and NFT-related news appear to have a significant impact on GameStop's stock price. In early January, GME's stock rose by a stunning 26 percent in after-hours trading following the announcement of the company's new NFT subsidiary.