On January 19, 2026, the annual barometer of the global mobile gaming industry—Pocket Gamer Connects (PGC) London conference—officially kicked off. As one of the oldest and largest B2B exhibitions in the mobile gaming field, a notable feature of this PGC is the deep integration of the Web3 technology stack with the traditional game development ecosystem.
Unlike previous years where blockchain was only treated as an experimental sector, this year's exhibition shows that game infrastructure based on distributed ledger technology has gradually moved from the fringes to the center stage. The significant changes in today's market capital flow, especially the asset price fluctuations of targets like Immutable (IMX) and Ronin (RON), are not merely emotional outbursts but a pricing correction reflecting the market's shift from 'financial speculation' to 'technical implementation' in the GameFi sector.
Today's market focus is centered on the technical release of Immutable's Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution. On the first day of the conference, the Immutable team officially launched the iterative version of its user identity authentication system—'Passport 2.0.' Analyzing from a technical architecture perspective, the core value of Passport 2.0 lies in solving the 'last mile' problem that has long hindered Web2 users from entering the Web3 realm, namely the complexity of private key management and the friction costs of on-chain interactions. The new version achieves complete invisibility of back-end on-chain logic to front-end users by introducing more mature account abstraction technology and fiat payment channels.
More crucial substantive progress lies in the commercial expansion aspect. Immutable officially announced that the passport system has been successfully integrated into three traditional mobile games with AAA production standards. This move signifies that Web3 game infrastructure service providers are no longer limited to serving native crypto games, but have begun to possess the capability to support traditional large-scale games with high concurrency, high-quality graphics, and complex economic models. Driven by this technological implementation and commercial cooperation news, the secondary market has reassessed the IMX token, with its price recording an increase of over 18% within the day, leading to capital inflow into the entire Layer 2 gaming sector. This market behavior reflects investors' recognition of the logic that 'seamless Web3 experience' will bring in incremental users.
If Immutable represents a breakthrough in infrastructure-level technology, then today's performance of the Ronin ecosystem demonstrates the resilience and evolution of application-level operations. As a sidechain focused on gaming applications, the data growth of Ronin today primarily stems from a major version update of its leading application, Pixels. The adjustments to the land mechanism announced by the Pixels team not only expand gameplay but also serve as a macro regulation of its internal economic system. The new mechanism aims to maintain user activity while curbing token inflation by increasing resource consumption scenarios and adjusting output efficiency, thereby constructing a more sustainable economic closed loop.
Meanwhile, the update of the Ronin wallet on mobile further lowers the interaction threshold for users, creating a synergistic effect with the update from Pixels. On-chain data shows that the number of daily active user addresses (DAU) on the Ronin network reached a new high today since 2026. The growth of this data is of significant reference value, indicating that after years of market reshuffling, Web3 games that have managed to survive and continue to grow mostly possess playability and community stickiness independent of speculative attributes. The price trend of the RON token also exhibited a stable upward trajectory today, as market funds began to shift from purely MEME speculation to focusing on targets supported by genuine on-chain active data.
From a macro perspective on industry development, the signals conveyed by the PGC London conference are clear: Web3 games are undergoing a process of 'demystification' and 'reconstruction.' The era of attracting users solely through the 'Play-to-Earn' Ponzi model is over, replaced by an asset confirmation model of 'Play-and-Own.' Whether Immutable aims to eliminate technological barriers or Ronin focuses on optimizing economic models and user experiences, the essence is to bridge the gap between the crypto world and the mainstream gaming market.
Furthermore, the shift in attitude of traditional gaming giants at this conference is also noteworthy. Although most traditional manufacturers did not directly issue tokens, their interest in middleware technologies such as Passport 2.0 indicates a consensus direction within the industry to utilize blockchain technology to address ownership of virtual assets and cross-platform trading issues. This hybrid model of 'back-end on-chain, front-end traditional' may become the mainstream form of Web3 game development in the next one to two years.
In summary, the recent fluctuations in the GameFi sector are not coincidental events driven by specific incidents, but rather a necessary release following the critical accumulation of industry technology. The infrastructure upgrade of Immutable has paved the way for large-scale user entry, while the activity in the Ronin ecosystem proves the ability of quality content to attract users. The market is gradually correcting its valuation logic for the gaming sector, shifting from simply examining token price increases to assessing the feasibility of technological implementation, the authenticity of user retention, and the robustness of economic systems. As more traditional AAA titles experiment with blockchain technology by 2026, the GameFi sector may welcome a value regression cycle driven by fundamentals, and the dynamics observed at today's PGC conference are merely the beginning of this long-term narrative. While investors pay attention to short-term price fluctuations, they should also examine the long-term value of each project in terms of technological barriers and ecological construction.