If you want to know where web3 gaming is headed next, study its leading studios. Their moves will shape the state of blockchain gaming to come, defining the trends and games that will define the industry through 2025 and beyond. Whether you’re interested in web3 gaming as a player or as an investor tracking the underlying tokens, the major studios are the tastemakers whose new integrations, developer tooling, and releases will play a pivotal role in determining where the sector is headed next.
While the GameFi sector is now vast, encompassing dozens of dedicated chains, hundreds of studios, and countless dapp developers, a handful of major players dominate, as is the case in most onchain verticals. They’re by no means the only source of innovation, but they play a significant role in guiding GameFi by launching the AAA titles that will be critical in achieving the hallowed goal of mainstream adoption. If you’re looking to take a snapshot of the industry’s health in 2025, start by studying the following five.
Mythical Games
By now, the history of Mythical Games is well known to anyone who’s taken even a cursory look at web3 gaming. Founded in 2018, just as GameFi was getting out of the blocks, Mythical, led by larger-than-life CEO John Linden, got off to a flyer with debut smash hit NFL Rivals. Regarded as one of the first genuine crossover titles that attracted mainstream gamers in their millions, the game found success off the back of its NFL licensing and combination of arcade-style gameplay and dream team-building that hit the sweet spot.
In 2025, NFL Rivals remains Mythical’s biggest game, but that could be about to change. The studio has not one but two major titles on the verge of release, either of which is well capable of making NFL Rivals’ 6M downloads look like rookie numbers. FIFA Rivals takes the existing playbook and applies it to the other football – soccer – and comes with official FIFA licensing. Pudgy Party meanwhile, based on the Pudgy Penguins NFT collection, promises to be a cutesy platformer that looks sure to satisfy the tastes of web3 natives.
With these two about to ship, other titles in the pipeline, and Mythical Chain offering developers ready-made tooling and a hugely successful NFT marketplace – powered by MYTH – for trading in-game items, Mythical Games is poised for a bumper year.
Gala Games
Gala is a blockchain-based gaming platform centered around empowering players through providing access to decentralized player-owned economies. Founded in 2019 by Eric Schiermeyer, a co-founder of Zynga – best known for FarmVille – Gala Games is intent on keeping things fun. It specializes in casual games, in other words, the sort that are easy to pick up and a lot harder to put down. Like other leading gaming studios, Gala believes that web3 gaming is best delivered through enhancing the playing experience rather than drowning gamers in blockchain technology.
Yes, there’s blockchain beneath the surface, but that’s seamlessly abstracted from the playing experience. As a result, casual players don’t need to be onchain experts to become proficient at a typical Gala game. In 2025, Gala is directing its energies towards onboarding with the goal of laying the foundation for eliminating the barriers to mainstream adoption. It’s been adding fiat onramps while keeping its existing player base engaged through regular community updates that add value to the popular titles released under its banner to date.
Gala Games is proof that web3 gaming doesn’t need to be complicated and should never be daunting. If millions of mainstream gamers do take to GameFi in the years to come, a significant tranche of them will do so thanks to the groundwork that Gala has laid down and that is now starting to yield dividends.
Sky Mavis
There’s a certain irony in one of the industry’s most successful web3 studios being relatively unknown to web3 gamers. That’s because they know Sky Mavis by its games first and foremost. Replace “Sky Mavis” with “Axie Infinity” and everyone knows who you’re talking about. It may seem hard to believe, but development on Axie began more than seven years ago, making it not only one of the biggest web3 releases of all time but also one of the earliest.
Axie Infinity boasts KPIs that put the rest of the industry in the shade – and it’s still going strong. We’re talking more than $4B of in-game trading volume and over two million unique Axie owners. The game, which is undergoing a new lease of life, has 300K monthly active players and continues to set the benchmark that other GameFi titles are measured against. But Sky Mavis is much more than a one-trick pony: it’s also responsible for EVM chain Ronin, which supports a whole host of third-party games great and small.
This year, Sky Mavis has been building out its ecosystem, which basically means refining and expanding its dev tooling. As a result, it’s never been easier to build and deploy a game on Ronin with the aid of tools such as Mavis Market for trading in-game items and Mavis Hub which forms a GameFi launchpad.
Immutable
No web3 gaming listicle would be complete without Immutable. It’s a fully-fledged GameFi powerhouse that can justifiably use the term “ecosystem” to describe its extended family of games and products. It’s got a blockchain, a wallet, an NFT marketplace, APIs, SDKs, and all the other nuts and bolts that devs require to deploy their own web3 games. As you’d expect of a company that casts such a large shadow over the web3 gaming industry, Immutable has multiple divisions, with Immutable Platform handling its developer services and Immutable Games its in-house studio.
So let’s talk Immutable Games. While Gods Unchained is the title for which it’s best known, it’s got a lot more strings to its bow. Just take a look and you’ll appreciate just how vast Immutable Games is and how many genres it straddles. If the releases available in the Immutable Play store are anything to go by, the future of web3 gaming is free to play, mobile-friendly, and blessed with RPGs galore. More than perhaps any other studio, Immutable has made the greatest strides in seamlessly integrating every component of its tech stack, allowing players and developers alike to glide effortlessly through its sprawling ecosystem.
Nakamoto Games
While the Play-to-Earn description has gone out of vogue in some web3 circles, it’s very much alive in the Nakamoto Games universe – even if you’re more likely to hear it referred to as Play and Earn these days. Whatever you wish to call the formula, it’s at the center of the web3 releases Nakamoto has released on Polygon. These are games with native tokens at their heart and opportunities aplenty for players looking to experience a combination of entertainment and earning opportunities.
Having released more than 200 games to date, ranging from AAA titles to more casual offerings, Nakamoto captures the diversity that has made web3 gaming so exciting. While not the largest studio on this list, Nakamoto’s output is prolific and it deserves plaudits for keeping web3 gaming accessible. It’s not here to lure hardcore video gamers into web3, but to satisfy crypto natives and onboard plucky mainstream gamers who fancy seeing what this blockchain malarkey is all about. On that basis, it’s doing an excellent job so far and the best is yet to come.
From Mythical Games to Nakamoto Games, the five companies profiled here are proving that web3 gaming comes in all flavors. Assessed from a player perspective, there’s a lot to be excited about in the months to come as eagerly-anticipated games launch and third-party developers take full advantage of the tools now available to them – including web2 studios. It remains to be seen whether web3 gaming becomes the preferred playground of billions or merely a thriving offshoot of the traditional gaming sector. But just under a decade into its lifespan, this much can be said for certain: GameFi is very much alive and kicking.
Image by VanDulti from Pixabay
