Immutable, the Australian Web3 gaming company once valued at $3.5 billion, is overhauling its business, cutting almost its entire in-house game development team to focus on an AI marketing platform. The company eliminated 29 roles across its gaming teams, co-founder and president Robbie Ferguson told Forbes Australia.
Most work on its flagship titles, the card game Gods Unchained and the role-playing game Guild of Guardians, will move to outside contractors, leaving only a small internal team to set strategic direction. Gods Unchained remains the main revenue driver, while Guild of Guardians shifts to a support-only mode with no active development.
The new priority is Immutable Audience, a platform unveiled in late 2025 that uses AI to analyze player behavior and help publishers run more effective marketing, lifting downloads, conversion and in-game spending. Crucially, Immutable has opened it beyond Web3 to mainstream Web2 publishers.
Ferguson said the goal is to make it “an AI platform for growing the entire gaming market.” The company points to early traction: it says Ubisoft’s mobile title Might and Magic: Fates tripled its pre-registration-to-install conversion to 10.2% using Audience, and that 40 new games joined its ecosystem in the past month, a pace Ferguson said could reach about 500 a year.
The pivot comes under real financial strain. Immutable posted a net loss of $48 million in 2024, narrowly improved from about $50 million the year before, on total revenue of $232 million that included gains from revaluing its crypto holdings.
Ferguson acknowledged the company will not break even in 2026 and said it will keep spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a month to build Audience. He maintains that Immutable has roughly ten years of runway left from its 2022 funding round. The restructuring follows deeper cuts: the company has shed about a third of its staff over the past year and now uses AI for much of its in-game art and content, work that once cost more than $1 million annually.
The Pivot’s Logic
The shift reframes Immutable from a maker of its own games into a vendor of infrastructure and growth tools for other studios. That is a safer position than betting on hit games in a brutal market, and Audience’s appeal to traditional publishers like Ubisoft gives Immutable a far larger addressable market than Web3 alone.
The risk is that it is now competing in crowded user-acquisition and analytics software against established players, with an unprofitable core and a product still early in its commercial life. Whether the claimed growth in onboarded games converts into durable revenue, rather than free trials, will determine if the bet pays off.
A Web3 Reckoning
The retreat reflects the collapse of blockchain gaming. The average Web3 gaming token is down about 95% since 2022, Immutable’s own IMX token has fallen roughly 99% from its peak, and venture funding for the sector has nearly dried up. Once a flagship of crypto gaming, with partners including TikTok and GameStop on its Ethereum layer-2 network, Immutable is now distancing itself from standalone Web3 games.
The move also fits a wider, painful reset across the games industry, which has shed tens of thousands of jobs since 2022, with companies increasingly citing AI as they trim content teams and lean on automation. For Immutable, the SEC ended its investigation into the company in March 2025, removing one overhang as it reorients around AI.
