Immutable and Polygon Labs Unveil $100M Blockchain Gaming Fund – The Defiant

Immutable, Polygon Labs, and King River Capital have teamed up to launch a $100 million web3 gaming fund.

Announced on March 19, the Inevitable Games Fund (IGF) aims to identify high-growth opportunities within the web gaming sector for investors. IGF is a privately offered fund available to “certain types of progressional and sophisticated investors” capped at $100 million.

King River Capital will be tasked with heading the fund’s investment process, while Polygon and Immutable will lean on their experience and expertise in the GameFi sector.

However, an announcement described the fund as “ecosystem-agnostic,” suggesting the IGF will look to make investments into web3 games operating on networks other than those within the Immutable and Polygon ecosystems.

“The combination of King River Capital’s expertise in venture and digital asset investing, together with Immutable and Polygon Labs’ web3 gaming deal flow and digital assets expertise, uniquely positions the fund to identify best-in-class investment opportunities across the multi-hundred billion dollar global video game industry,” IGF said.

King River Capital is no stranger to the web3 sector, with the firm backing Consensys, Aztec, LayerZero Labs, and Immutable since launching in 2019.

The news follows GameFi projects posting an impressive recovery in recent months, with the combined capitalization of gaming tokens surging 170% since late October to $24.34 billion, according to CoinGecko. The sector is down 22% since tagging a local high of $31.3 billion a week ago.

Immutable is the largest GameFi protocol with a $3.57 billion market cap. The project launched the mainnet rollout of its zero-knowledge rollup, Immutable zkEVM, in January.

Zeb Rice, the co-founder and managing partner at King River Capital, likened the potential of web3 games to the explosive growth of mobile games over the past decade and a half.

“Just as mobile gaming went from virtually zero in 2008 to 79% of gamers playing mobile today, we believe a similar shift has only just begun to web3 technology,” Rice said. “[IGF] is designed to benefit from this multi-hundred billion dollar shift in spending to this disruptive new technology.”

IGF has already secured commitments from leading entities in the web3 space including Merit Circle, a gaming focussed DAO, Mike Arrington, the founder of Arrington Capital, Immutable co-founder Robbie and Hames Ferguson, and Polygon Labs co-founder, Sandeep Nailwal.

Alpha Wave Ventures, an investment firm backed by the Abu Dhabi Royal Group’s Chimera Capital, has also pledged to back IGF.

IGF said it preemptively made seven early-stage investments prior to its formal establishment, including allocations backing Pixelmon, Metacore, Guild of Guardians, and My Pet Hooligan.

According to Game 7’s State of Web3 Gaming 2023 report, the blockchain gaming sector has attracted $19 billion worth of investments since 2018, including $1.7 billion worth of investments during 2023.