Their parents did not love the video games. Robbie and James Ferguson spent hundreds of hours on RuneScape and League of Legends as boys, which frustrated the adults in the house. James has said it showed him how much of life would one day be digital.
Both brothers were headed for professional careers. Robbie, the younger, finished top of his school and started a double degree in computer science and law. He never finished it. What it did give him was a friend, Alex Connolly, who became Immutable's third co-founder and chief technology officer. James, five years older, was working through commerce and law when he took a year off and went to San Francisco to learn to code. He now calls himself a recovering law student.
At least 20 people were laid off, including core members of the Gods Unchained team.
In 2017 CryptoPunks launched, and the brothers saw something. If a digital item could be owned and traded, a game could work the same way. They built Etherbots, which they describe as the first multiplayer competitive blockchain game. It launched in February 2018. Robbie was 21. The game reportedly earned about US$1 million in its first week.
That result did more than pay bills. It gave a pair of young founders credibility to raise money. In July 2018, as Fuel Games, they began pre-selling Gods Unchained, a trading card game, after a US$2.4 million seed round led by Continue Capital and Nirvana Capital. The company became Immutable in 2019 and built Immutable X with StarkWare.
Then the money got enormous. In March 2022 a US$200 million round led by Temasek, with Tencent and Animoca Brands, valued the company at US$3.5 billion.
The same year brought the fall. The IMX token had traded near US$11 in November 2021 and slid to just above US$1 by July 2022. At least 20 people were laid off, including core members of the Gods Unchained team. In December 2023 an Adults Only rating from the ESRB briefly removed the game from the Epic Games Store.
Immutable has kept going. Guild of Guardians launched in May 2024, and in August 2026 the company released Immutable Audience, a Steam promotion tool that does not use blockchain.
The lesson is not about crypto. Two brothers who nearly became lawyers took a childhood obsession seriously, built something small that worked, and let that first week of proof pay for everything after.