In our latest community townhall, Immutable co-founder and President, Robbie Ferguson, reports on the state, trends, and industry insights from the current web3 gaming landscape.
This article will cover the following topics:
- A brief recap of Immutable’s fundamental strategy
- Observation: insights and trends from events in 2023 so far (NFT.NYC, GDC and ConsenSys)
- Immutable’s product strategy and our relentless focus on gaming
Immutable’s Fundamental Strategy
Immutable’s goal is to be the number one ecosystem for NFTs, which empowers and rewards players and users. We are laser-focused on web3 gaming because we believe that the next explosion of crypto and web3 adoption will be driven by even just a single game with 10 million players.
We are striving towards this by partnering with, and supporting as many quality games as possible within the Immutable ecosystem. More successful hit games leads to a massive community of dedicated and passionate gamers empowered by true unique value ownership over their digital assets. More players means attracting more games to build on our ecosystem, and the cycle continues indefinitely.
The complete Immutable ecosystem will not be something a single chain, protocol, or platform could ever hope to compete with.
Observation: What we learned from NFT.NYC, GDC, and Consensus 2023
We’ve been quietly building and iterating relentlessly on a product-led strategy to empower developers and players.
Now, we’re finally showing the world what we’ve been building by increasing our presence and sponsoring major industry events in the gaming space to an incredibly positive and excited reception from developers and major game studios alike.
Here are the headlines from speaking directly with the gaming industry on the ground at NFT.NYC, GDC, and Consensus 2023:
Less noise, more building: gaming is becoming a singularity for web3
- Gaming is becoming the most prominent area of interest in these events and in the broader web3 industry.
- Total attendance across these conferences have decreased, but genuine interest and passion of game builders has never been higher.
Builders love Immutable’s partnership with Polygon
- Since the announcement of our industry-defining partnership in March at GDC, games have expressed relief that they no longer have to undergo a painful decision process when it comes to choosing which chain or solution to build on.
- Web3 gaming has been far too complex for too long, games are excited to have the simplest and best tech and platform stack at their fingertips with Immutable.
- Zk-rollup tech is becoming the industry standard for web3 gaming
Web2.5 games
- Developers want to build exceptional games with crypto, NFTs, and blockchain utility ‘under the hood’.
- There has been a shift of emphasis away from marketing the ‘web3’ part of games as the primary value proposition to players
Immutable’s Product Strategy: A relentless focus on gaming
Gaming has become one of the most hotly contested categories in the blockchain industry, attracting close $15 billion in capital investment over the past few years.
Impressively, Immutable has achieved first place in market share for one simple reason: we are building an ecosystem that is relentlessly focused on solving for players and games, rather than trying to broadly solve everything from de-fi, finance, art etc.
This ruthless execution is principal to our product strategy: to build a familiar user experience for gamers that they know and love, and help them onboard into web3 gaming without ever needing to know about ‘web3’.
- Immutable Passport is built to improve conversion on performance marketing for games with the goal of increasing customer acquisition from 10 - 20x.
- We achieve this by providing a single-sign on and passwordless wallet for players to remove onboarding friction and ease of adoption.
Immutable zkEVM
- Abstracting away the difficulties of custom smart contracts for mainstream game developers with the best protocol-level architecture
- Our universal orderbook eliminates fragmented liquidity across all games, wallets, and chains in the Immutable ecosystem
- Last year, it was reported that the Immutable Global Orderbook doubled trade volume and revenue for games, and we expect this to scale massively with network effects as our ecosystem expands.
Immutable’s product suite is shaping the global rails on which users will be able to buy and sell an asset in any wallet, on any rollup, on any marketplace, in any currency.
The Immutable Ecosystem will be bigger than any single chain or platform
To own the ever-shifting landscape of web3 gaming, we know that Immutable needs to be more than a single chain or platform; we need to build a vibrant ecosystem of games, players, and technology infrastructure for the new era of gaming.
There is still much to do, but Immutable is setting the trend and paving the way for a bright and summer for web3 gaming.
You can view the full recording here, and previous Immutable Community Townhalls on the Immutable YouTube Channel.
To get started, explore www.immutable.com/play to check out the 150+ games building on our ecosystem today!
