Polygon and Immutable team up to help get more gamers and developers into Web3

Web3 gaming company Immutable and layer-2 blockchain Polygon hope a new strategic alliance will accelerate innovation and adoption in the burgeoning crypto gaming space, the two companies announced at the Game Developer Conference on Monday.

“For us, it’s a pretty obvious game,” said Robbie Ferguson, co-founder and president of Immutable. “We realized the scaling limitations of Ethereum very quickly, but we never wanted to compete with it.” Polygon could help Immutable avoid Ethereum congestion and costs without having to create its own alternative.

The alliance will focus on making Web3 games faster, easier and less risky for major game studios and independent developers to get involved.

Last year, games built on both platforms received around $2 billion in funding from investors, Ferguson and Ryan Wyatt, president of Polygon Labs, shared with TechCrunch.

“To me, it’s like the next evolution in mainstream adoption,” Wyatt said. “You’re already starting to see blockchain games with higher fidelity.”

Immutable’s new Ethereum Zero-Knowledge Virtual Machine (zkEVM) – fancy terminology for virtual machines that compress data to improve scaling and security on the blockchain – will be powered by Polygon technology and supported on its platform. Polygon’s zkEVM scaling technology aims to reduce transaction costs while remaining compatible and secure with the Ethereum Layer 1 blockchain, which is essential for the long-term growth of the blockchain and its ecosystem.

Polygon is “a very clean, well-polished end-to-end solution and marketplace for game developers and gamers,” Wyatt said. “There has been some skepticism as to where this can go and what it will look like […] now you’re going to see it kick into high gear over the next two years.

The combination of the two companies’ technologies could help scale transactions 100 to 1,000 times more than before, Ferguson said.

Although this initiative is new, both platforms have formed massive gaming ecosystems through partnerships and integrations with game studios, traditional businesses, and crypto companies.

Polygon Labs, the team behind the Polygon decentralized protocol, has worked with gaming companies like Square Enix, Neowiz, Midnight Society, Plai Labs, and Tilting Point. The company’s Layer 2 scaling solution has seen notable adoption, including tens of thousands of decentralized applications deployed, over 220 million unique addresses served, over 1 million smart contracts deployed and billions of total transactions processed since its inception, he shared.

The Polygon network is also integrated with crypto projects like Aave, Uniswap, and OpenSea, and well-known companies like Robinhood, Stripe, and Adobe, which could help expand its reach even further.

The Polygon network is also home to some of the biggest Web3 game projects and publishers like Ubisoft, Atari, Animoca Brands, Decentraland, and Sandbox, among others. Over the past year, Polygon has partnered with a number of other major brands like Starbucks for its Odyssey digital collectible rewards program and Disney for its accelerator program, while ensuring that major brands clothing companies like Prada and Adidas are launching NFT projects through its blockchain.

Separately, Immutable has brought games and Web3 initiatives to its platform in recent months, including brands like GameStop, DC Comics, TikTok and Marvel and IPs from Disney and Star Wars. The platform also launched a $500 million fund in June to boost adoption of Web3 games.

The announcements noted above could indicate growth in the Web3 gaming industry; more brands entering the Web3 gaming space could grow the broader decentralized gaming market, much like how integrations between Web 2.0 companies have historically helped increase their own reach.

“Gamers just want to play great games; it’s as simple as that,” Wyatt said. “You really have to get to a point where you abstract away the crypto and the lingo and then just have a really exciting game. And that is what is looming on the horizon.