Web3 gaming will onboard up to 100M gamers in next 2 years, Polygon and Immutable presidents predict

About 40% of web3 games being built will go live in next 12 to 18 months, Immutable co-founder says

Two key players in the web3 gaming space predict exponential expansion in the next few years.

Robbie Ferguson, co-founder and president of web3 gaming company Immutable, and Ryan Wyatt, president of layer-2 chain Polygon Labs, told TechCrunch+ that web3 will add the first 10 million to 100 million gamers within the next year or two.

“We’re going to see 40% of the web3 games [ever] built go live over the next 12 to 18 months, which will be a huge amount of attempts or shot-on-goal to have that 100 million players,” Ferguson added. If this prediction becomes true, it would represent a massive wave of adoption that the decentralized gaming industry didn’t have before.

On Monday, web3 gaming firm Immutable teamed up with layer-2 blockchain Polygon to help grow the scaling and adoption of the subsector. The collaboration will focus on making web3-enabled games faster to build, easier to use and less risky for larger gaming studios and independent developers to get involved.

“What we now are seeing is these games are being built to go live because games have a lead time of two to four years,” Ferguson said. “What’s required is incredible infrastructure for them to build an incredible customer experience where players can use this.”

“Over $100 billion are spent by players every year on in-game items,” Ferguson said, implying that the market for web3 games could be large. “This is not the box copy of Fortnite or the ability to download a game. This is literally [money spent on] skins, Candy Crush coins and costumes.”

But those assets are not ownable by players or, at best, are part of a gray marketplace, he added. “The opportunity here is to take a multi-100-billion-dollar asset class and make it truly ownable by players and make sure that the rights and the keys stick with them rather than a major third-party company.”

The only way web3 gaming scales is through true property rights, Ferguson thinks. “And if they have no idea how web3 works under the hood.”