GameStop surges 13% after rumors it may be working with Microsoft on NFT games

Shares of popular video game chain GameStop (GME) surged about 13% in a day as rumors circulated online about a partnership with Microsoft to develop NFT games.

Shares of GME were trading at $115.60 as of the close on Feb. 8, according to TradingView, and remained around that level in after-hours trading.

GME started February at around $100 and has been ramping up this month, backed by GameStop’s partnership with NFT-focused layer 2 Ethereum scaling solution Immutable X on its upcoming NFT marketplace. As part of the deal, GameStop also launched a $100 million IMX token grant program for NFT content creators and technology developers.

Rumors that have recently circulated through channels such as Reddit and Twitter suggest that GameStop may work with Microsoft to integrate NFTs into existing games, while creating new NFT-focused games.

Twitter user "P_MackD" shared an image earlier today that included screenshots posted by Immutable X and Microsoft execs about a major partnership with GameStop.

Yorke Rhodes III, head of Microsoft's blockchain division, specifically mentioned Xbox, Microsoft, and GameStop in a tweet, suggesting that the tech giant may play a role in the behind-the-scenes collaboration between Immutable X and GameStop.

While it's unclear what the exact connection between the three parties is, a Feb. 6 post on the Reddit community r/Superstonk outlined a noteworthy hypothesis about what the collaboration might entail.

Commenting on Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of gaming giant Activision Blizzard, bamfcoco1 pointed to the company’s turn-based player vs player collectible card game Hearthstone as a ripe product for NFT integration via Immutable X and GameStop.

The Redditor believes that Hearthstone's user base has dropped from a peak of roughly 23.5 million to 3.5 million, partly due to the high cost of collecting cards and the lack of true ownership of user assets, which could be resolved by integrating NFTs:

"With the ability to freely mint and trade NFTs on the Immutable X platform, it's easy. GameStop could launch Hearthstone on their brand new Web3 platform by simply making NFTs for each card and then swapping them accordingly Distributed to the user's existing card collection. It's the easiest thing to do."

It seems that Web3 and NFT related announcements have had a big impact on GameStops stock price. Cointelegraph reported in early January that GME’s price jumped 26% in after-hours trading following the announcement of the company’s new NFT arm.