The share price of Reddit's cult-favorite stock GameStop Corporation (GME) jumped by one quarter (in after-hours trading following a Wall Street Journal report on its upcoming NFT division. The U.S. retail game store giant has been quietly working on an NFT marketplace since May, and ramped things up in October by listing several job openings for Web 3.0 and NFT-experienced software engineers and product marketers. According to a Jan. 6 report from the WSJ, GameStop has now hired more than 20 people to operate its freshly minted NFT unit. An unnamed source familiar with GameStop’s plans told the outlet that …

Nonfungible tokens and blockchain-based gaming projects saw a breakout in popularity over the course of 2021. This was due to their widespread appeal which attracted the attention of crypto newbies and experienced hodlers alike. This trend helped to further initiate the mass adoption of blockchain technology and from the look of things, its likely to extend throughout 2022. One project is making moves in 2022 is Phantasma (SOUL), a layer-one blockchain protocol that specializes in the creation of SmartNFTs and decentralized gaming applications. Its prices reflect that it's about to make a run for a new all-time high. Data from …

Wider adoption of nonfungible tokens (NFT) and play-to-earn games may be on the way, as one of the world's largest gaming companies sees them as the future of the industry. Yosuke Matsuda, CEO of Square Enix, revealed the company's intentions for blockchain and NFT spheres in his new year's message on Saturday. In his letter, Matsuda begins with a discussion of the metaverse before noting that Facebook's renaming to Meta is proof that the concept isn't a passing fad. He expects 2022 to be a year of hype for the metaverse as society begins to slowly embrace virtual worlds and …

Twitch co-founder Justin Kan launched a new blockchain gaming-focused NFT marketplace yesterday dubbed Fractal. Fractal’s Discord group has since amassed more than 111,000 members, despite only being announced two weeks ago. At the time of writing, it appears that the most significant sale on the platform so far was for a Baby Scoot NFT that went for 4 Solana (SOL) worth roughly $680. The Solana-based marketplace enables users to buy, trade and hold NFTs used in blockchain games. In an announcement made yesterday, the firm unveiled its first partnered blockchain games, including The Sandbox, Nyan Heroes, Caveworld and Genopets, to …

Metaverse gaming platform Ready Player Me has announced a $13 million Series A funding led by the respective co-founders of Wise and Teleport, Taavet+Sten, with further participation from the co-founder of GitHub, Tom Preston-Werner, alongside Samsung Next, Konvoy Ventures and Gmoney. The platform intends to utilize the capital to advance ambitions for avatar interoperability between metaverse worlds. This initiative supports the thesis of multiple digital dimensions as opposed to a singular model, a critic often leveled at Meta, formerly known as Facebook, amid cautions of their attempts to land-grab, or monopolize, the metaverse space. Aside from this, Ready Player Me …

The South Korean government has moved to block the release of new play to earn (P2E) games and requested that existing ones be removed from Google Play and Apple’s App Store. P2E gaming has become popular in the cryptocurrency industry. Gamers typically must first purchase game pieces as non fungible tokens in order to play the game and receive in-game rewards. However gaming prizes over a few dollars are banned in South Korea. The Game Management Committee (GMC) in the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism yesterday requested major mobile app marketplaces block any games that require in-app purchases before …

Crypto exchange Huobi’s research arm Huobi Research has identified a rising interest in blockchain gaming as a direct impact from GameFi initiatives. GameFi implies the use of decentralized finance (DeFi) and blockchain gaming that incentivizes users based on a play-to-earn model. According to Huobi Research, on-chain data suggests that GameFi initiatives have seen a steep increase since June 2021 owing to a sizable reduction in transaction costs and improved user experience. The research shows that popular blockchain games such as CryptoKitties recorded a maximum of 140,000 daily active users and 180,000 daily transactions back in Nov. 2017 but lost over …

Catch up on nonfungible token (NFT)-related news this week as Cointelegraph rounds up the stories you don't want to miss. Bored Apes gets cast in an TV series The Red Ape Family (TRAF) is a new animated comedy series centered on Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFTs. Episodes are sold as individual NFTs and run between 5 to 10 minutes long. The plot is about a family of Bored Apes that escape Earth to live on Mars. OpenSea is already reselling Episode 1 and the yet-to-be-released Episode 2 is available to mint. One Episode 1 token holder received a Bored …

PwC Hong Kong, an international subsidiary of the global PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) organization, announced Thursday its emergence in the metaverse space with the acquisition of LAND in the popular world The Sandbox. Though the cost of its LAND asset was undisclosed, it was noted that PwC Hong Kong intends to construct a Web 3.0 advisory hub to facilitate a new generation of professional services, including accounting and taxation. The global organization PwC, headquartered in London, U.K., documented revenues of $45 billion from June 2020 to June 2021, up 2% from the previous year. William Gee, a partner at PwC Hong Kong, …

Shrapnel is the world's first AAA shooter game built on the blockchain, at the intersection of community, creation, and ownership. The team is comprised of BAFTA and Emmy award-winning talent that has worked on blockbuster franchises such as HALO, Call of Duty, Madden, Bioshock, Destiny, Star Wars, Hawken Skylanders, Westworld, and more. It is built on blockchain gaming platform Forte. In an exclusive ask-me-anything session with Cointelegraph Markets Pro, Don Norbury, head of studio at Neon Media, the game's developer, offered an in-depth take on what the game has to offer. Cointelegraph Markets Pro User: When I think of gaming, …

Blockchain gaming continues to grow and dominate the nonfungible token space with a share of roughly 22% of all NFT trading volume in the third quarter of 2021, according to a report released by the Blockchain Gaming Alliance, or BGA. The report showed that NFT games accumulated $2.32 billion in revenue between July and September. Metaverse-related activity was also highlighted in the report. It showed that virtual land sales reached $42.6 million while the total market capitalization for virtual world decentralized apps reached an all-time high of $4.6 billion at the end of November. Additionally, the report mentioned that there …

French gaming giant Ubisoft Entertainment SA’s new nonfungbile token (NFT) project Quartz is facing strong pushback from the gaming community. Ubisoft unveiled the Beta launch of Quartz via a brief YouTube video on Dec. 8 that has 214,721 views at the time of writing. The project aims to combine NFTs and blockchain technology with existing Triple-A game titles, and announced Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint as its first game to officially integrate NFTs. The video introduces Quartz as a platform that enables gamers to “collect the first playable and energy-efficient Ubisoft NFTs” that are dubbed as “Digits.” YouTube recently changed …