GameStop CEO Fired as Company Retreats from NFTs

Matt Furlong, the executive responsible for initiating the company’s push into nonfungible tokens (NFTs), has been fired as CEO of GameStop.

According to a statement released on June 7, Furlong was fired. Ryan Cohen, a billionaire investor held in high regard by memestock traders following the infamous GameStop short squeeze in 2021, was promoted to executive chairman.

After the company disclosed Furlong’s dismissal, Cohen tweeted the cryptic message, “Not for long.”

The company did not explain Furlong’s dismissal. Nevertheless, according to an 8-K filing with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission on June 9, 2021, Furlong’s contract stipulated a 24-month employment term.

Concurrently, Furlong resigned as the company’s director, reducing the number of board members to five.

The announcement coincided with GameStop’s first-quarter earnings call, during which the gaming company reported earnings per share that were 133% below market expectations.

According to data from Google Finance, the company’s share price has fallen to $21, down 19% in after-hours trading.

In June 2021, five months after the memestock mania that caused GameStop shares to surge 3,000% from $17.25 to $500 in a single month, Furlong became the company’s CEO.

GameStop introduced its NFT marketplace in June 2022, just as the market’s interest in NFTs waned. Later, GameStop added blockchain game NFT support to its marketplace, a move made feasible by its partnership with the Web3 gaming platform and Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution ImmutableX.

The company’s NFT marketplace launch was well received, with sales of nearly $2 million in the first 24 hours after the platform went live. However, things soon took a turn for the worse.

In August, the marketplace’s daily sales volumes hovered around $4,000, a 99.8 percent decline from its opening-day pandemonium.

GameStop announced in December 2022 that it would no longer devote significant resources to cryptocurrencies or NFTs, following a poor third-quarter earnings call in which the company racked up $94.7 million in net losses and began striking off employees.

Despite these assertions, GameStop has partnered with Illuvium, an Australian blockchain game developer, to launch a 20,000 NFT collection.