Indie devs outraged by unlicensed game sales on GameStop’s NFT market

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

In the first week of GameStop's recently launched NFT marketplace, the NiFTy Arcade collection stood out from the pack. Instead of offering basic JPEGs, the collection provided "interactive NFTs" linked to HTML5 games that were fully playable from an owner's crypto wallet (or from the GameStop Marketplace page itself).

There was only one problem: Many of those NFT games were being minted and sold without their creators' permission, much less any arrangement for the creators to share in any crypto profits.

While the man behind NiFTy Arcade has since been suspended from GameStop's NFT marketplace, he's still holding on to the tens of thousands of dollars in cryptocurrency he made by selling those NFTs before the suspension. And while the NFTs in question are no longer listed on the GameStop NFT marketplace, the unlicensed games themselves can still be accessed on GameStop's servers and across a blockchain-based file storage system, where they may now be functionally impossible to remove.