By C. A. Ramirez

GameStop is taking us back to the future. A slew of tweets has rekindled a by-gone theory that GameStop is on the prowl to revive Blockbuster. The once dominant titan of the movie and video game rental industry is planning a return so monstrous that LL Cool J himself will have to call it a comeback.

The real world may have been reduced to a shell of its former self over the last two years, but the metaverse has been developing alongside its decay. Creeping along a scaffold of ones and zeros, held together by cryptographic terms like blockchain, zero knowledge proof-of-stake roll ups, gas fees, and decentralized exchange. The future of gaming has arrived, and it is up to every gamer to seize it, and the best way to do it is through an old video game retailer.

GameStop has risen from the veritable ashes of the pandemic, fit as a fiddle. The corporation, headquartered in Grapevine, Texas, has nearly a billion dollars in cash reserves and is also sitting on top of a mountain of supply with two new fulfillment centers. This dying brick and mortar store is coming back to life. Standing at the precipice of a technological and financial crossroads, GameStop is poised to change the lives of everyone from California to Calcutta.

The GameStop NFT Marketplace opened its Beta platform on July 11, and it is thriving. The marketplace generated more revenue in its first week than the entire volume of the Coinbase marketplace has to date. However, according to mainstream news, and the jabbering heads over at MSNBC, GameStop is a dying brick and mortar with no future. A derelict retailer could not possibly succeed in a technologically driven space, but it has. The GameStop NFT Marketplace has generated over half a million in sales in the first week alone. A dying brick and mortar should not understand web3 commerce, zkr smart contracts, or P2E blockchain gaming; and it certainly wouldn’t have executives that understand these bleeding-edge technologies, or would they?

Enter Ryan Cohen, founder of Chewy, lover of animals, nice guy, punctual. Cohen’s vision for GameStop is to transform it into one of the most customer-oriented tech companies the world has ever seen. So far, it has been a wildly successful endeavor. Not too long ago, mainstream media had declared GameStop “dead-in-the-water”, a bumbling brick and mortar store destined for bankruptcy. Enter the all-star C-Suite executives from the most successful corporations on Earth.

Aged brick and mortar retailers, destined for bankruptcy, would not be able to drag away executives from the cream of the crop of Fortune 500 corporations. Ryan Cohen is acting chairman, and his success with Chewy is no secret. Cohen sold Chewy to PetSmart for the princely sum of $3.5 Billion and left the company. Now, with majority share control over GameStop, Cohen set out to hire a few friends. The level of uncompromising talent that GameStop possesses at the corporate level has never been assembled in the history of commerce. The meeting of Smith and Wesson pales by comparison. Corporate partnerships live and die everyday, but occasionally, a union so devilish is formed that its matrimony cannot be stopped by any force, living or dead. GameStop may have resurrected Blockbuster from the cellar boxed, short-selling graveyard of Wall Street.

The nearly extinct media retailer has risen from the dead. After a nearly two-year hiatus, Blockbuster resurrected its Twitter handle, hinting at a partnership with GameStop. The rumors have proven true. The theory is that Blockbuster will debut on the GameStop NFT Marketplace as a “Creator”, allowing users to buy, sell, trade, and rent movies, tv shows, and video games, while allowing customers to own these digital assets. On March 2, 2021, PlayStation announced that it will discontinue its movie and TV purchases, as well as its rentals on the PlayStation Store. I personally “owned” over 200 movies through the PlayStation Store, and now, I don’t. GameStop will change this losing paradigm forever. Blockbuster is now in a unique position to dominate the digital landscape and evolve from a zombified retailer of yesteryear into a next-gen digital Decentralized Autonomous Organization of the metaverse. Blockbuster failed to seize the reach of the internet twenty years ago, allowing Netflix to rise to dominance within the world of entertainment media. Fate, it would seem, is not without a sense of irony.

Streaming is going to die. I repeat, steaming will be no more. Paying a monthly fee will fade into the ether, and all that will remain is digital ownership. A new age of proprietorship will place the control of your digital assets squarely in your hands. You and you alone will decide what happens to your media because, for the first time in decades, the customer will be in control of it. Ethereum smart contracts will allow P2P rentals, ensuring royalty percentages are seamlessly passed from buyer to seller, and then to GameStop and the appropriate publisher/studio. Everyone gets a cut, and no one is left out in the cold. The NFT Marketplace will revolutionize the video game and movie industries forever. In the immortal words of Ryan Cohen, “buckle up”.

Power to the players. Power to the creators. Power to the collectors.

*Check out the author’s previous work on in-game assets and NFTs in “Welcome to The Age of NFTs”.

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