GameStop is a newcomer to the NFT market.
In the September 2022 edition of DappRadar’s New Dapps Report, we dive deeper into Dapps and marketplaces which are climbing the NFT charts. The New Dapps Report is a detailed analysis of financial metrics for NFT collections with a solid appeal.
This New Dapps Report is part of a series of executive reports that provide readers with a high-level perspective of promising, generative NFT collections and Marketplaces. The report focuses on financial metrics, including sales activity, price analysis, and distribution metrics like Unique Holders Ratio and Whale Concentration Index. It additionally dives into whales’ behavioral patterns and social and technical overviews.
GameStop Marketplace, launched on 11th July, has recently been integrated into DappRadar. GameStop is the newcomer to the NFT market, previously having had its claim to fame through the extensive chain of video game retail stores.
GameStop captured the attention of market participants in January of 2021 when its stock mooned from 5$ to 80$ a share, with some of the trades going as high as 120$. The company stock was excessively shorted due to its failing business model and delayed adaptation to the new online sales environment. It has since then reinvented itself and is not leading the pack by branching into gaming NFTs.
Please do not consider this document as financial advice.
Data updated on: Sep 15, 2022
Table of Contents
Key Takeaways
- The highest trading volume was on the second day after the launch, which accumulated a trading volume of $2 million.
- The total trading volume for the platform is just over $22 million, 58% of which was earned in the first trading month of July.
- GameStop earned an estimated $496,506 since launch.
- In August 2022, GameStop was the 9th largest NFT marketplace, with a volume of $6,387,516.
Financial Overview
Gamestop Marketplace – Gradual decline
Blockchain: Ethereum / LoopRing
Launch date: July 11, 2022
GameStop is a latecomer to the scene of NFTs. A move that nobody saw coming. It joined the ranks of challengers seeking to chip away at the dominant position of OpenSea. It currently ranks as the 9th most traded marketplace as of August 2022.
The highest trading volume for GameStop was on the 12th of July, the second day of trading. It reached over $2 million in traded volume with 41 thousand trades.
On average, that comes down to $48 per trade. Over half (58%) of the dapp’s total volume was traded in the first month of July. That flow has sharply dropped on consecutive days and has been low for months. The average trading volume as of September is $334,184.
Regarding traders, GameStop has 21,878 Unique traders in total, with the highest recorded of 9981 on July 12th. These stats are unimpressive compared to OpenSea, which dwarfs these parameters by order of magnitude. For comparison, OpenSea has a daily volume of $10 million, with an average of 33,474 traders on the marketplace.
This subpar performance, though, is a consequence of several factors. One key element is that GameStop launched in a challenging market. The market was already bearish due to macroeconomic factors like the war in Ukraine, rising energy prices, and inflation resulting from the 16 trillion dollar liquidity stimulus since 2020.
The market trading volume slumped by 85% in August since the peak of $5.7 billion in January. Although not directly related to NFTs, the Terra Luna debacle has drastically affected the price of Bitcoin. The depreciation of Bitcoin sent a cascading effect into other crypto assets, forcing many to liquidate. As a result, the prices of NFTs have dropped, and the appetite has waned.
Secondly, the competition is also very stiff as multiple other marketplaces have been vying for dominance and chipping away at the throne of OpenSea. X2Y2 is the second marketplace that dominated nearly a fourth of the total trade volume for NFTs.
Magic Eden, a Solana-focused marketplace that controls 7.1% of the total market, comes in third place. GameStop, by comparison, only has 0.7% of the total organic NFT sales.
Despite leaning heavily into game-related NFTs, it has no substantial advantages over its peers. GameStop also launched at a time when many large brands such as Disney, Warner Brothers, and Coinbase set up their marketplaces.
Still, during August 2022, GameStop was the 9th biggest marketplace with a total volume of $6,387,516, just slightly outdone by NBA Top Shot. NBA has a total volume of $6,752,696, which is only 5% higher than GameStop.
Controversy arises
Despite being relatively smooth on a technical level, the launch has already had bouts of controversy that have negatively affected the marketplace’s reputation.
In July, GameStop had an astronaut theme and focused on selling related NFTs. One of the NFTs was a photoshopped version of a famous photograph of a man falling from the Twin Towers during the 9/11 terrorist attack.
The NFT was sold multiple times and reached a price of 5 ETH / $7,492 before being pulled from the marketplace. The trouble didn’t end there; another collection was caught selling unlicensed work and was removed after significant backlash from the community.
Said, collection ‘Arcade Games’ created by the user NiFty has been selling interactive NFTs of arcade cabinets with various games. The creator of the collection has been selling these without getting the permission of the original game creators.
Due to the factors mentioned above, GameStop’s performance as a marketplace has not been stellar. It has earned a total volume of just over $22 million with 252,000 sales. For the company, this nets a revenue of $496,506 or nearly half a million dollars.
According to the Q2 report, GameStop had a revenue of $1.4 billion. This would mean that NFTs would only make up 3.5% of the total, which is not a significant part of GameStop’s business.
A likely answer is that GameStop is banking on the growth of blockchain gaming and the trade of game assets as NFTs. Blockchain gaming has already received 6 billion worth of investments this year and is poised to become a $50 billion industry by the year 2025, according to Crypto.com.
Currently, blockchain games dominate blockchain interactions, and 51% of all blockchain dapp interactions in Aug 2021 have been with blockchain games which came to 847,230. This dominance has been persistently increasing throughout the year.
Social Awareness and Engagement
GameStop’s Twitter impressions correlate with the number of traders on the platform. We can observe the same pattern as with the trading volume, where a steep decline succeeds an initial rise. The highest trader count of 9,981 occurred on July 12th. The current September average is around 1200 traders, an 87% decline from the peak.
GameStop created a Twitter account in March 2022. The profile currently has 84,933 followers and gained 40% of its followers in May. Since May, the average daily growth has declined to 142 new followers in the last 30 days.
GameStop does not have a Discord, and there are no known plans if it interns to create one in the future.
Collections and Trading
Although GameStop does plenty of unique game-focused collections, its performance is primarily overshadowed by collections of other marketplaces.
In the last thirty days, the top-selling collection in GMERICA 1 was produced by GameStop itself. The collection has a total volume of 664 ETH or $996,000. The floor price of 0.11 ETH or $165, with only five different types of NFTs totaling 532.
Despite being a flagship collection, it is missing several features from the pedigree that current users have come to expect. The art is pretty but only has five different NFTs with a relatively limited supply.
One aspect is much better performance for a flagship collection. The floor price is below average compared to a new-minted on OpenSea like RENGA. As it Stands, RENGA, minted on September 7th, has a floor price of 0.84 ETH, a volume of 2700 ETH, and a total supply of 6900 assets in the collection.
While this is not an indictment of GMERICA 1 performance, GameStop can undoubtedly make an effort to attract creators who can make the next hit collection like CloneX, Moonbirds, or BAC, which would be exclusive to GameStop.
As it stands today, despite the remarkably sleek design, GameStop marketplace has many features missing that come associated with many of its competition.
The buyers need to be able to filter and sort individual assets within the collection and filter different collections based on their performance. As it stands now, the sorting tools are rather limited. Gamestop would also benefit from tracking the trading performance and statistical support for many collections. One feels remiss without features pertaining to the average price, the trading history of an NFT, and the historical progression of a floor price.
The buyers would appreciate the ability to purchase multiple NFTs in bulk or as a pack.
Those users who are more technically inclined would require links to Etherscan for a given collection or links to socials that are missing for most collections.
Without these features, it will be hard for GameStop to attract the necessary talent to sell on its platform.
Technical Overview
From a technical standpoint, GameStop has not had any technical issues. The marketplace so far has been free from hacks, exploits, or any other significant breaches.
The marketplace is built on the Layer 2 solution, Loopring. This means low fees and high transaction speed, secured by the Ethereum mainnet.
GameStop has had issues with users selling unlicensed works as NFTs, which GameStop has only removed due to community backlash. The issue stems from the fact that GameStop does not verify if the sold product is genuine and instead shifts the onus on the buyer to ascertain the validity of the product. Although GameStop protects intellectual property per its TOS, the procedures to ensure it are few.
Summary
GameStop is the ninth largest marketplace for NFTs as of August 2022, with 0.7% of the total NFT market share launched on July 11th. The initial launch saw trading volume rise as much as $ 2 million, with a total of 41 thousand sales occurring on 12 July. The launch was met with much enthusiasm on social media, and the official Twitter page, which was launched in March for the project, had a steady influx of followers, particularly in May, which accounted for 40% of the total growth of the account. GameStop focuses on gaming-related NFTs and plans to use the platform as an extension of its gaming business.
The launch occurred at a very inopportune time. Many macroeconomic factors, such as the war in Ukraine, rising inflation and energy costs, the Terra Luna debacle, and the depreciation of many crypto assets, have caused a prolonged bear market.
The bear market diminished the enthusiasm for NFTs and affected the sales of GameStop. GameStop had also launched when the competition was very stiff, as many other marketplaces like LooksRare and Magic Eden have emerged. GameStop is a neophyte in the crypto space and lacks the edge to compete with many of these marketplaces.
Although the launch was a technical success due in part to the Layer 2 loop ring solution that ensures fast translation speed and low gas fees, it was not without issues. GameStop has been lax with quality control and was embroiled in numerous controversies regarding selling a photoshopped photograph of a man falling from the world trade center during the 9/11 terrorist attack.
The other controversy involved selling a collection whose assets the creator did not own and has appropriated from other creators. The collection was eventually deleted but only after significant community backlash.
Despite the lack of success with the initial launch, GameStop is banking on the bright future that blockchain gaming will bring. Some estimate the industry to reach a valuation of $50 billion in the next three years, and GameStop wants to play a crucial role in that development.
