NFT gaming to drive blockchain adoption: Immutable cofounder

Blockchain gaming will likely remain a key driving force for wider Web 3.0 adoption, and the gaming sector will be “quite hit-driven” over the next 12 months, Robbie Ferguson, cofounder of Immutable — which builds Immutable X, a layer-2 scaling solution on Ethereum — told Forkast on Tuesday at Korea Blockchain Week 2022.

See related article: NFT startup Immutable valued at $2.5 billion in Temasek-led financing

Fast facts

• “We’re going to see a few mid-market studios who are completely committed to building an experience that is actually better for players and leverages Web 3.0 to grow faster with biomechanics and to offer more value to players,” Ferguson said. “That means they have sort of higher retention mechanisms (that) truly outperform.”
• Ferguson added that out of any market, “the reason that we first looked at gaming was it had a clear analogous demand in the real world.”
• “People bought every year US$100 billion worth of in-game items they had zero property rights to. They regularly got screwed over by gaming publishers when they switched up the terms and when they could trade it,” Ferguson said.
• With the new game design mechanics in Web3, such as composable finance, third-party financial incentives, marketplaces and the invention of guilds, “we’re actually going to take that US$100 billion [and] pretty quickly transform it into a much, much bigger economy overnight,” he added.
• In March, Australia-based Immutable raised US$200 million in a Series C funding led by Singapore’s Temasek, and in June launched an investment fund to accelerate Web3 gaming adoption.
• Last month, the company reportedly laid off about 6% of its workforce, including lead designer James Wakeham who was involved in the development of the game developer’s popular NFT game Gods Unchained. Also in July, it hired former Polygon executive Aviral Avasthi to lead marketing strategy.

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