AWS is the cloud computing offshoot of the retail tech giant. PAU BARRENA—AFP/Getty Images
Immutable, valued at $2.5 billion as of March 2022, announced on Tuesday that it had partnered with Amazon Web Services in two programs designed for startups.
AWS will add Immutable, which built and now supports a blockchain designed for video games, to its roster of companies within its ISV Accelerate Program, a means for developers to connect and sell each other on their services and products. And any game developer who wants to build on Immutable’s blockchain will also be able to enroll in AWS Activate, an accelerator that provides startups, technical support, training, and free credits for building on the cloud computing giant’s servers.
“The example that we’ve put together here with Immutable is super fascinating because of what they’re doing in changing a market that’s been around for a long time,” John Kearney, AWS’s head of startups in Australia and New Zealand, told Fortune. (Immutable is based in Australia.)
In an already competitive cloud computing market, AWS’s partnership with Immutable is one of only a few blockchain-focused tie-ups that the tech giant has recently publicized, in contrast to Google Cloud, which has repeatedly announced Web3–focused initiatives, including those with Polygon, Coinbase, and other prominent crypto companies.
AWS currently outstrips its competitors with a more-than-30% share of enterprise computing workloads, and Kearney said that while the tech giant has remained comparatively quiet on the blockchain front, it has a suite of products for Web3 developers, including Amazon Managed Blockchain, which allows developers to transact with and read data from blockchains.
Moreover, AWS reports that approximately 25% of all workloads on Ethereum, one of the most popular blockchains, run on its servers, “but that’s not something that we write on LinkedIn and post every day of the week,” Kearney said. “That’s just not our style.”
Immutable, for its part, hopes that its partnership with AWS will continue to onboard crypto-naive developers to the world of Web3.
“A lot of blockchain purists are very big into the idea of decentralization and that everything has to be on-chain,” said Michael Powell, the product marketing lead at Immutable. “And that’s a massive deviation from where game developers actually build.”
So many game studios build on AWS, he added, that any connection with the computing giant helps bridge the gap between what game developers are already familiar with and the world of blockchain, which, he said, makes “that chasm much easier for game devs to cross.”
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