Immutable CSO questions ‘walled garden’ ethos as competition ramps up

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Immutable — the gaming-focused crypto company with titles like Gods Unchained and Guild of Guardians — is learning from its years in crypto.

The firm now oversees 500 games from different developers. Simply put, that’s a lot of shots on goal.

I sat down with Justin Hulog, Immutable’s chief studio officer, to get the latest on its ecosystem. Hulog previously worked at Riot Games.

He admits Immutable’s massive roster makes it harder to give each game a lot of attention — and even more games are coming.

“What I’ve seen at Immutable over the past three years is a really significant maturation,” Hulog told me.

He wishes Guild of Guardians could have had a better launch with its use of key opinion leaders (KOLs), and would have liked more data around wallet spending to inform decisions.

But he sees the free-to-play pixelated MMORPG Ravenquest as a success. Ravenquest saw its land sale sell out in December and launched this month.

“We’re pushing a lot more of the games towards zkEVM,” Hulog said of Immutable’s newest chain. “A lot of that has to do with where we think the market is gonna go, and the value of L2s, and what’s the use case, right? So I think for us, it’s really that Immutable zkEVM really is the future of where we’re pushing things.”

Immutable is also more open now to the idea that a walled garden isn’t necessarily the answer, either, in part because there are so many different gaming chains — many with their own dedicated wallets. In Immutable’s case, there’s a dedicated single sign-on Passport wallet, as well as a dedicated NFT marketplace.

“I think our first hypothesis three years ago used to be that all of these things had to be in one ecosystem and in one gated ecosystem. And there was a point in time when we realized that not only doesn’t work for every game, it doesn’t work for every gamer,” Hulog said.

I pointed out that if the goal was to have a walled garden to fight the competition, it may not have worked because Immutable’s competitors like Ronin, Sui, and others haven’t exactly given up — or stopped growing. And if each gamer has to have more than four wallets just to participate on different gaming chains, it could feel untenable.

“A lot of us are realizing that,” Hulog said, adding: “Gaming players in the Web3 space — should we be spending our time fighting against each other trying to claim supremacy, or should we really be trying to push Web3 gaming as a whole forward so that we can get broader adoption and make better experiences?”