Robbie Ferguson - Why Web3 + Gaming Will Be the Next Billion-User Industry - TOKEN2049 Dubai 2025

I'm Robbie Ferguson uh from Immutable. Um, a little bit about me is I am a massive gamer. I have 3,000 hours of League of Legends and a terrible ranked uh score. And when I was 13 years old, I shared a Runescape account with my brother. We played on this account and one day I went into the wilderness and I lost his most valuable armor.

And I felt so bad that the next day I went on a real world trading website and I bought Runescape Gold to buy back the armor that I had lost. One week later, the account was banned for real world trading. 6 months later, Jagex rolled out first class support for selling in-game gold to players. It was pretty clear that this was an industry where a the digital items that you earned or bought truly mattered to the players who use them, but b it was controlled with complete impunity and for no reason other than the fact that these objects were intangible. If you bought something in real life, you would expect the ability to sell and trade that later on.

When you buy something online simply because you can't touch it, we've said you should have zero property rights. With web 3, that can change. And I think it's not only change how people interact with finance, it's going to how change how people interact with entertainment. But don't take my word for it. Look at the trend of how gaming has shifted over the last 40 years.

There's been four major distribution shifts, all could terminus with a shift in technology. The first we had was the shift to console gaming. I don't know, does anyone here play games in arcades growing up? This is how people used to play video games. You used to have to leave your home, you would go to some arcade down the store and you'd play some variant of Pac-Man, Pong, whatever is available then.

And the first thing we had was with the rise of consoles. But consoles only became popular when the technology that allowed to bring them into your home became ubiquitous and incredibly cheap. In fact, consoles only became possible when 95% of households had a TV in their homes. And suddenly that became the new distribution format for how people were entertained. The shift to PC gaming only became possible when the average home computer cost less than $3,000, which took a very long time after the size where PCs were the size of your living room.

We then had to shift to social and mobile gaming with things like Farmville and free-to-play games. This only became possible with massive advancements in not only mobile technology but also broadband technology where it became incredibly cheap to download and play games no matter where you were in the world. Each of these was a new technology becoming sufficiently good, cheap, and ubiquitous that it unlocked a new distribution for the world's most popular entertainment format, video games. The latest distribution technology we have is the ability to own digital stuff. And it was invented with Bitcoin and it was made available to any form of unique asset with the advent of NFTts on Ethereum in 2015/16.

And what this technology is going to do is it's going to be a horizontal change, not a vertical change. It's not going to change where you play games. but it's going to change how you own and interact with your assets no matter where you do play them. I wanted to talk a bit about gaming as an industry as a whole. And the reason I feel confident getting up here today and saying gaming is going to be the first billion user industry of web 3 is that gaming in general is a 3.

3 billion user industry monthly. It is the most popular entertainment category in the world and it's not even close. Gaming revenues now surpass music, movies, and TV combined, and it's compounding at 10% yearonear. When you have interactive entertainment, it becomes a superset of any other entertainment that you have within that category. Kids now go to concerts inside of Fortnite.

They see their favorite artists like Marshmallow with 60 of their friends in a private audience in a Fortnite server. They socialize and make friends in Call of Duty maps or Minecraft mods. They're going to learn school and be educated in digital universes and environments. And very soon we're going to have interactive environments where the fidelity of the experience is imperceptible from real life. if we aren't already in a simulation today, according to some popular theories.

And the reason this is so significant is it's pretty clear that gaming is an unstoppable vehicle that people will digitally experience everything from socializing to forming romance to uh interacting with people for the first time to financial interactions. And there's no chance of this slowing down. Today, gaming is a 200 billion US revenue industry and twothirds of that revenue come from not the ability to play games, but the items that you're purchasing inside of it. And this is perhaps the most interesting shift we've seen with gaming over the past three decades. Games have gone from an arcade where you walk down the road and you put $2 in to a concept where you purchase a copy of a game for $80 and play at home to games as a service where you would pay a monthly subscription to access your online version of a game or purchase assets online to really games as a platform today to Fortnite.

Minecraft is two of the fastest emerging property titles over the last decade where ultimately the reason they've grown is you can create mods, you can create user generated content and the scale of entertainment scales proportionately with the amount of players and the amount of hours invested in these games. The logical extrapolation is how do you allow people to not only create things but make a living off the creation of things inside of these games? And I think we've seen this explode in the industry. Here is just a selection of games, not in the industry, just literally ones that we immutable work with. But there has been more than cumulatively 15 billion US invested by venture capital inside of web3 gaming over the past 3 years.

There's been far more than that invested in gaming as a whole where we now see some of the world's biggest companies building games with web 3 technology. Ubisoft last week announced they're building one of their most popular IPs, Might and Magic with Immutable. Uh we have Pokemon coming to Sooie blockchain. We have uh essentially some of the biggest gaming companies in South Korea, Net Marble, building several of their titles now on chain. And I think all of this portends a very exciting future because this isn't build a game, wait two years, and see how it works.

These are studios with millions or tens of millions of players in single games saying, "We want to integrate crypto." For context, Ethereum's monthly active user base on chain is roughly 7 million. So just one of Net Marble's titles would have more users than all of Ethereum combined. I think it's clear why gaming is going to be the most popular driver of users to blockchains out of any industry or category. Uh, and I I think we're already seeing that velocity pick up over the last year.

So again, what I promised today was not a future vision, but a reality check on where have we come with gaming and the promises that have been made in the last year. And if we look at the last year, I think it's been incredibly exciting. 12 months ago, immutable ZKVM, our main chain, didn't exist. Immutable Play, our wallet, was a concept in our product manager's eyes. And we had barely touched on how do we solve distribution for web 3 games and make it accessible for billions of players who will never learn what a seedword is or never learn what the concept of a private key is.

Since then, we've more than doubled the amount of games building on Immutable's platform. We now have over 600 total well-funded games with millions of dollars in average funding building on Immutable ZKVM, the ecosystem. We've just hit a million monthly active users in ZKVM. It's the fastest growing chain uh of all time. Uh and it's the youngest chain in the top 10 by monthly active users uh out of any other.

And something I'm really really excited about is Immutable Passport. last two weeks ago ticked over 5 million signups. One of the fastest growing wallets in the world. And the reason we've been able to do this is because of relentlessly focusing on not the 100,000 users on crypto Twitter. As much as we love to obsess over that, it's how do we get the end user off a random game to be able to sign up, play, and own assets without ever knowing they're using blockchain under the hood.

And you can try it now. If you search for Mutable Play and you sign up for an account, you can sign up in under 5 seconds using an email, using Facebook, using uh your Apple authentication, and it creates a self-custodial wallet under the hood, which you can recover via email. I'm incredibly proud of this because the user experience required to onboard gamers is far harder than any other entertainment category. As they say, with all new technologies, gaming and porn go first. And gamers are fickle beasts.

They're incredibly demanding in terms of the user experience they want and expect. And I think if we can solve the user experience of crypto for gamers, by definition, we will have solved it for mainstream users. So what I want to talk about next is the future of blockchain going gaming and where are we going over the next 1 2 3 years. And the first thing I'll say is that if you just extrapolate the users that have come from the 30 or so games that have gone live today out of the 600 building on the platform, there are going to be more users on immutable, let alone blockchain in general from games than there will be from any other category. And again, that's an extrapolation of a trend we've already seen.

We've seen some of the biggest games in the space launch in the last few months. Raven Quest had more than a million streams on its Twitch launch an MMO RPG very very similar to Runescape and we've had AAA publishers invest and build at an unprecedented rate. I think uh the the stat was something like uh 12 months ago we had zero um AAA studios building on the platform. We now have three multi-billion dollar companies. We just announced Ubisoft Net Marble, which is South Korea's largest mobile gaming company by revenue, is building multiple properties on Immutable.

And the most exciting thing to me is they're doing this not because of some hypothetical game where they're making a huge amount of money off whale spenders. It's because they fundamentally believe they can achieve a a much better player experience which will help players stick around longer but b a much better customer acquisition cost and customer acquisition has been the echlesial of blockchain since day one. Blockchain has been an incredibly highly monetizing audience and it's meant companies have been able to survive with audiences of 100,000 people or fewer. If we are genuinely to take web 3 mainstream, we have to focus on products which are invisible to the end user, where it doesn't feel like blockchain and where they're genuinely experiencing value ad from without even knowing it's blockchain under the hood. One of the things I was most excited about is Ubisoft, which is one of the world's biggest game companies.

It's worth multiple billions of dollars. It's a public company. This is a company with a lot to lose from a risk and reputational perspective is incredibly focused on how do they do better for players and how do they reinvent the industry for better. And fundamentally to me the reason I jumped into blockchain when I was uh 18 years old is I thought it was a model for better incentive alignment than the existing web 2 model. It was a way of giving people ownership of things that previously could only be owned by a very limited number of shareholders.

And to me, the best future possibility for tokens is programmable equity that can be owned by billions of people instead of hundreds of employees, where every single person who uses an a network, a game, an application can end up owning some of the enterprise value that they're bringing to that. That to me is the same incentives of capitalism, but in a way that is far fairer and a much better equilibrium state for overall ownership of of value. So I wanted to leave you with a couple of questions which is first web 3 as a concept has been focusing on inventing industries from 0 to 1. But I think one of the most exciting potentials is how do we take the potential of web 3 as a superpower for distribution for user acquisition for loyalty and for ownership and apply it to industries that already exist. I think we've seen some of the biggest use cases emerge over the last two years being stable coins, being DeFi, and being ownership.

And fundamentally, if we can take this to the most popular and most fickle entertainment category in the world, we will have solved the user experience for all of these adjacent applications by default. So, I'm personally incredibly excited uh by the future. I think we're going to be standing here in a year or two looking at not a billion, but maybe a 100 million users uh on games. And from there it's going to very quickly accelerate. Thanks very much for your time and I will catch you next time.