Gaming company Web3 Immutable and Blockchain Layer 2 Polygon hope the new strategic alliance will accelerate innovation and adoption in the nascent crypto gaming space, the two companies announced at the Game Developers Conference on Monday.

“It’s a pretty obvious game for us,” said Robbie Ferguson, co-founder and president of Immutable. “We very quickly realized the limitations of ethereum scaling, but we never wanted to compete with it.” Polygon can help Immutable avoid Ethereum overload and costs without having to create their own alternative.

The alliance will focus on making web3-enabled games faster, easier and less risky for major game studios and independent developers.

Last year, creating games for both platforms received about $2 billion in investment from investors, Ferguson and Ryan WyattPresident of Polygon Labs, shared with TechCrunch.

“To me, this looks like the next evolution of mass adoption,” Wyatt said. “You are already starting to see higher fidelity blockchain games.”

new zero knowledge The Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM) — fancy terminology for virtual machines that compress data to improve scalability and security on the blockchain — will be powered by and supported on Polygon’s technology platform. Polygon’s zkEVM scaling technology aims to reduce transaction costs while maintaining interoperability and security with the Ethereum level 1 blockchain, which is critical to the long-term growth of the blockchain and its ecosystem.

Polygon is “a very clean, highly polished end-to-end solution and market for game developers and gamers,” Wyatt said. “There was some skepticism about where it could go and what it would look like. […] now you’re going to see it go into overdrive in the next couple of years.”

Combining the technologies of the two companies could help scale transactions 100 to 1,000 times more than before, Ferguson said.

While this initiative is new, both platforms have formed huge gaming ecosystems through partnerships and integrations with game studios, traditional businesses, and crypto companies.

Polygon Labs, the Polygon decentralized protocol team, has worked with game companies such as Square Enix, Neowiz, Midnight Society, Plai Labs, and Tilting Point. The company’s Tier 2 scaling solution has seen notable adoption, including tens of thousands of dapps deployed, over 220 million unique addresses served, over 1 million smart contracts deployed, and billions of total transactions processed since inception.

The Polygon network is also integrated with crypto projects such as Aave, Uniswap and OpenSea, as well as well-known enterprises including Robinhood, Stripe and Adobe, which can further expand its reach.

The Polygon network also hosts some of the biggest web gaming projects and publishers such as Ubisoft, Atari, Brands Animok, Decentraland and Sandbox, among others. Over the past year, Polygon has partnered with a number of other major brands such as Starbucks. Odyssey Digital Collector’s Awards Program and Disney for it accelerator programas well as big clothing brands such as Prada and Adidas launch NFT projects through your blockchain.

Separately immutable has built-in web3 games and initiatives for its platform in recent months, including brands such as GameStop, DC Comics, TikTok and Marvel, as well as IP from Disney and Star Wars. The platform also launched $500 million fund in June to accelerate the introduction of web 3 games.

The announcements mentioned above may indicate the growth of the web3 gaming industry; more brands entering the Web3 gaming space could expand the larger market for decentralized games, somewhat similar to how integration between Web 2.0 companies has historically helped expand their own reach.

“Gamers just want to play great games; it’s so easy,” Wyatt said. “Really, you just have to get to the point where you abstract away the crypto and jargon, and then you have a really addictive game. And that’s what’s on the horizon.”