Immutable and Polygon Labs, the teams behind a pair of leading Ethereum scaling networks, announced Tuesday that they have teamed up with VC firm King River Capital to launch a $100 million blockchain gaming investment fund called the Inevitable Games Fund.
The collaboration has already secured an anchor commitment from Abu Dhabi's Alpha Wave Ventures, with additional investments from the likes of crypto gaming community Merit Circle, along with Immutable co-founders James and Robbie Ferguson and Polygon Labs co-founder Sandeep Nailwal.
Immutable and King River Capital are primarily guiding the fund, according to a release, with Polygon Labs “providing key sourcing” alongside industry expertise.
The Inevitable Games Fund has already invested in seven projects, it said, with four of them revealed on Tuesday: monster-battling game Pixelmon, mech shooter MetalCore, Immutable’s own mobile role-playing game Guild of Guardians, and battle royale shooter My Pet Hooligan.
Ethereum Mech Shooter 'MetalCore' Plans Open Beta, Token Launch in May
Studio369, the indie game developer behind Ethereum action game MetalCore, announced on Tuesday that it raised $5 million in new funding to launch the PC game on the Immutable zkEVM scaling network. And the team has big plans on the short-term horizon. MetalCore is currently planned to launch in open beta in May, letting anyone hop in and play the combination of mech suit combat and boots-on-the-ground shooting action. And if the planned timing works out, the game will also launch its token arou...
All but My Pet Hooligan are building on Immutable’s Ethereum scaling networks, and My Pet Hooligan is using Polygon. But while the initial announcements are heavily weighted towards the partners' own combined stable of games, the press release suggests that the fund will invest in games across “Web3 infrastructure… regardless of the platform.”
"Spending on video games exceeds the global revenue from movies, streaming TV and the music industry, combined, and it is ripe for a huge technology shift," said King River Capital co-founder and Managing Partner Zeb Rice, in a release. "We believe a similar shift has only just begun to Web3 technology. The fund provides investors with an opportunity to gain unique access to the best Web3 gaming projects globally."
Square Enix Brings Ethereum NFT Game Symbiogenesis to HyperPlay Amid Investment
Gaming giant Square Enix, the long-running publisher behind such franchises as Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts, announced Tuesday that it has invested in HyperPlay, a crypto-native game launcher. And Square Enix will bring its Symbiogenesis game to the store. Billed as “strategic fundraising” for the platform, HyperPlay declined to disclose the amount of the investment. But pseudonymous founder JacobC.eth exclusively told Decrypt’s GG that he sees the Japanese publisher as “the most forward thi...
This isn’t the first time that Immutable and Polygon, typically rivals in the Ethereum scaling space, have teamed up. Last year, the companies partnered to create the Immutable zkEVM scaling network, which is based on Polygon’s zkEVM technology.
Editor’s note: This article was written with the assistance of AI. Edited and fact-checked by Andrew Hayward.
