The Billion-Dollar Brothers: How the Fergusons Turned RuneScape Nostalgia Into Immutable
Two Sydney brothers who never finished their law degrees built one of web3 gaming's biggest companies and were reported to be worth a combined $1 billion by 2022. Here is how, and what the crypto winter did next.
Most people who grow up playing RuneScape and League of Legends end up with fond memories. Robbie and James Ferguson ended up with a company that was valued at $2.5 billion before Robbie turned 26.
The brothers, from Sydney, co-founded Immutable, the company behind the card game Gods Unchained and the Immutable X network for game NFTs. After a $200 million Series C in March 2022, Forbes Australia reported their combined net worth at about $1.01 billion, and the Australian Financial Review was already calling them "the $1b Ferguson brothers". It is one of the cleanest examples of founders who got very rich, on paper at least, from blockchain games.
Two dropouts and a robot game
Neither brother finished university. Robbie, who topped his school, started a computer science and law double degree and left it; that is where he met Alex Connolly, who became Immutable's third co-founder and technology chief. James took a year off a commerce and law degree to code in San Francisco, and likes to describe himself as a recovering law student.
They saw Ethereum in 2015, and the CryptoPunks collection of 2017 convinced them that NFTs and games belonged together. In 2018 they started Fuel Games and released Etherbots, a robot-battling game they billed as the first competitive multiplayer blockchain game. It reportedly brought in about $1 million in its first week.
Gods Unchained and the big money
Fuel Games' next idea was more ambitious: a trading card game in the spirit of Hearthstone, where players truly owned their cards and could sell them. Gods Unchained held its pre-sale in July 2018 and launched in 2019, the same year the company renamed itself Immutable. Its seed round that July was a modest $2.4 million, with support from Coinbase.
The bigger business turned out to be infrastructure. Immutable X, built with StarkWare, let games mint and trade NFTs without paying Ethereum's fees. Brands from GameStop to TikTok and Disney's crypto projects used it, and in February 2022 Immutable and GameStop announced a $100 million fund for NFT game grants.
Then came the headline round. In March 2022, Immutable closed a $200 million Series C led by Singapore's Temasek, with Tencent in the deal, valuing the company at $2.5 billion. Forbes Australia noted it was Tencent's first public web3 investment. A further $21.5 million followed in July 2022 at the same valuation.
When the winter came
The timing of the Series C was close to perfect, and it was close to the top. The company's IMX token fell from about $11 in November 2021 to just above $1 by July 2022, and that same month Immutable laid off at least 20 staff, including core members of the Gods Unchained team.
The next shock was legal. In November 2024, Immutable received a Wells notice from the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the warning that regulators may bring a case, over how IMX had been sold. The company said it would fight it. On 25 March 2025, after the change of administration in Washington, the SEC closed the investigation without action, about five months after the notice.
Where the brothers are now
The Fergusons still run the company. James is CEO and Robbie is president, the role that made him one of web3 gaming's most quoted executives. Immutable's games arm shipped Guild of Guardians in May 2024, and its marketplace tech powers Ubisoft's Might & Magic: Fates in 2026. In August 2026, it launched Immutable Audience, a tool to help studios market games on Steam, which the company says does not use blockchain at all: a telling sign of how far the pitch has moved since 2022.
Why it matters
The Ferguson story shows both sides of the blockchain gaming money. The billion-dollar figure was real in the sense that investors paid it, but it was built on shares and tokens priced at the peak. Their company survived the crash, a token that fell more than 90% and a US securities investigation, which many of their 2021 rivals did not. Whether the next chapter is still a "web3" story, or simply a games-technology one, is now up to them.
Token prices are highly volatile. Nothing in this article is investment advice.