GameStop has fired its CEO, Matt Furlong, the executive responsible for pushing the company's move into non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
According to a June 7 statement, Furlong was fired, while Ryan Cohen a billionaire investor highly respected by meme stock traders following the infamous GameStop short squeeze in 2021 was promoted. as Executive Director. ced Furlong's firing, Cohen tweeted a cryptic message saying "it won't last long." The company did not provide a reason for Furlong's dismissal. However, Furlong's contract provides for 24 months of continuous employment, according to an 8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on June 9 , 2021. At the same time, Furlong resigned as a director of the company, reducing the size of the board to five.
The news coincided with GameStop's first-quarter earnings call, in which the gaming company reported earnings per share that missed consensus estimates by more than 133%. The company's shares have plummeted to $21 and are now down 19% in after-hours trading, ac cording to Google Finance.
Furlong joined GameStop as CEO in June 2021, five months after a meme stock frenzy in which GameStop shares soared 3,000% from $17.25 to $500 in one month.
GameStop launched the NFT marketplace in June 2022, when the market's fascination with NFTs was waning. GameStop later added support for blockchain game NFTs to its marketplace, a move made possible through a partnership with Web3 gaming platform and Ethereum layer 2 scaling solution ImmutableX. The Company's Debut on the nft Marketplace was well-data, with nearly $ 2 miss in the sales in the first 24 homes of the platform's launch. a turn for the work. by August, The Market's Daily Sales WERE HOVERIND AROUND $ 4,000 A 99.8 % drop from the opening-day frenzy. In December 2022, GameStop announced that it would no longer focus any major efforts on cryptocurrencies or NFTs, after the company's third-quarter earnings conference call performed poorly, with a net loss of $9 4.7 million, and began to lay off employees.
Despite these statements, GameStop recently partnered with Australian blockchain game developer Illuvium to launch a collection of 20,000 NFTs.
