King River Digital Launches Gaming Investment Fund

King River Digital has partnered with major Web3 gaming players, Polygon Labs and Immutable, to establish a $100 million gaming fund.

Polygon Labd and Immutable, two of the largest names in Web3 gaming, have joined up with King River Digital to form a $100 million gaming fund. According to the business’s announcement on Tuesday, only specific categories of professional and sophisticated investors are eligible to participate in the privately marketed fund.

Alpha Wave Ventures, a venture capital firm supported by Alpha Wave Global and Chimera Capital, an affiliate of the Abu Dhabi Royal Group, was one of the first backers of the fund.

Inevitable Games Fund backers include Merit Circle, a Web3 game platform, and a number of angel investors, such as Mike Arrington of Arrington Capital, Steve Kokinos of Sonic Boom Ventures, James and Robbie Ferguson, co-founders of Immutable, and Sandeep Nailwal, a Polygon Labs employee.

Already, the fund has invested in a number of potential early-stage game projects, drawing on the knowledge of Polygon Labs and Immutable.

Animoca Brands and Delphi Digital supported the $8 million seed round that Pixelmon, an NFT gaming API, completed in February. IGF has identified MetalCore, Studio369’s massively multiplayer online game project, as one of the projects offering investors a high-growth possibility. Arrington Capital, Bitkraft Ventures, Delphi Digital, Sanctor Capital, SpartanGroup, and others have contributed $5 million to MetalCore’s fundraising round.

Among the projects that have previously garnered support from the IGF is the Guild of Guardians, a well-liked NFT gaming project and one of the initial games on Immutable. In anticipation of its release in the second quarter of 2024, the game has already attracted over one million pre-registrations.

My Pet Hooligan, an upcoming free-to-play game that uses blockchain and other emerging tech to improve the user experience, is also part of IGF’s inaugural portfolio.

The entertainment industry’s most innovative and ground-breaking immersive gaming experiences, web3 infrastructure, and top-tier game studios will all be part of King River Financial’s IGF financial deployment.

In response to the news, King River Capital’s Zeb Rice stated: “Spending on video games exceeds the global revenue from movies, streaming TV and the music industry, combined, and it is ripe for a huge technology shift.”

Despite the current downturn, Rice is optimistic that blockchain gaming will eventually recover and become as dominant as mobile gaming was in 2008, when it almost went bankrupt.

He went on to say, “We believe a similar shift has only just begun to web3 technology,” and that the Fund was set up to take advantage of the multi-hundred billion dollar shift in spending on web3 gaming projects around the world.

We are thrilled to be establishing this groundbreaking fund in cooperation with King River Capital and assisted by Polygon Labs,” said Robbie Ferguson, President and Co-Founder of Immutable. The Fund is well-positioned to discover and invest in the most promising web3 gaming and gaming infrastructure prospects worldwide thanks to our combined knowledge, worldwide connections, and industry reach.