GameStop and Immutable just announced their partnership to power the famous game retailer’s upcoming NFT platform. Watch out, the GameStop Community is coming for your NFTs!
We already knew that GameStop was curious about crypto and NFTs and looking into launching its own NFT marketplace. Yesterday’s announcement of their partnership with the Ethereum’s L2 for NFTs, Immutable X finally confirmed their plans.
See below the announcement from Robbie Ferguson, co-founder of Immutable.
This is a clear push to drive mass adoption to the NFT gaming world. We recently saw a lot of pushback from traditional gamers towards having NFTs built into their favorite games. We believe that this is mostly due to a mis-perception of the NFT space and what this technology cold actually bring to gamers. Here is what Ferguson has to say about that.
“The best thing to do is to create truly player-first gaming experiences that embrace the benefits, rather than the hype, of NFTs. Most importantly, the games have to be good – it’s play-and-earn, not play-to-earn. Gods Unchained, our trading card game, didn’t use the word ‘NFT’ for the first three years — we simply talked about the benefits players received, now they could sell or trade their card collection like you would Magic the Gathering or Pokemon cards. Until we can create amazing experiences without having to say ‘NFT,’ we’re not there.”
Robbie Ferguson, co-founder of Immutable
GameStop has a huge and dedicated community. With this partnership, GameStop is sending a strong signal to its community to adopt and embrace the opportunities that NFT gaming has to offer.
We already saw that right after the announcement, the price of the Immutable X token — $IMX — shoot up before quickly correcting. Anyway, this is just the beginning for this joint venture, and we can anticipate that many game developers and studios will follow and join the Immutable ecosystem.
A $100 million Fund for Game Developers and Studios
In a joint effort to attract the best developers and studios, the companies established a $100 million fund. They want to attract long-term projects and AAA studios and help them build the next generation of play-to-earn games: games that are fun to play and in which you can earn. This trend is now becoming a new meta in the industry. Moving away from the play-to-earn model and building the play-and-earn model.
Developers and game studios can already apply to get one of the grants out of this $100 million fund. Applications are open and interested actors can already fill an online form to express their interest.
What is Immutable X ?
Immutable X is an Ethereum layer 2 scaling solution for NFTs. Initially developed for Gods Unchained, the company has opened up its solution and many quality projects like Guild of Guardians or Ember Sword already joined them.
By building a layer 2 solution for Ethereum, Immutable enables game developers to benefit from the security and decentralized features of Ethereum while boosting their scalability and liquidity.
In short, the goal of Immutable X is to give player true ownership of their in-game items without prohibitive gas fees while capitalising on Ethereum’s strengths.
