blockworks.co
King River Capital, Immutable and Polygon Labs have partnered to launch the Inevitable Games Fund (IGF), which aims to bring additional resources into the Web3 gaming space.
The fund wants to be ecosystem agnostic and act as a resource to encourage innovation in the on-chain gaming sector. Its investment process is led by King River Capital, with the assistance of Immutable and Polygon Labs.
Only “professional and sophisticated investors” will be able to contribute to the fund, which has a cap size of $100 million. According to Brendan Ma, head of investments at Immutable, the fund’s first close has reached $30 million, and it has received commitments from investors including Alpha Wave Ventures, Merit Circle and several family offices.
A handful of investment opportunities have already been identified by the fund, including decentralized Web3 gaming IP Pixelmon, open-world player versus player arms game Metalcore and role-playing game Guild of Guardians.
In a press release reviewed by Blockworks, co-founder and managing partner at King River Capital Zeb Rice said that video game spending exceeds global revenue from movies, streaming services and the music industry combined.
“Just as mobile gaming went from virtually zero in 2008 to 79% of gamers playing mobile today, we believe a similar shift has only just begun [with] Web3 technology,” Rice said. “The Fund provides investors with an opportunity to gain unique access to the best Web3 gaming projects globally and is designed to benefit from this multi-hundred billion dollar shift in spending [on] this disruptive new technology.”
Since 2018, the Web3 gaming sector has received over $19 billion in investments, and a 2023 PwC report estimates that this number will only rise. The report estimates that 2027 gaming revenues will reach over $312 billion, representing a 7.9% compound annual growth rate between 2023 and 2027.