Immutable announced Immutable Audience, the growth engine for pre-launch Steam games, helping studios grow wishlists faster, reduce launch risk, and track what works with world-class attribution.
Audience builds on growth capabilities developed through Immutable’s work with more than 700 games and studios and sits alongside its existing game infrastructure products.
“It’s basically a growth engine for pre-launch Steam games. PC/console has been stuck in the dark ages for attribution, measurement, and distribution, especially compared to mobile games,” said Robbie Ferguson, CEO of Immutable, in an interview with GamesBeat. “It’s an incredibly important market, and we want to help studios grow their wishlists faster, reduce their launch risk, and track what works with attribution across other wish lists.”
Ferguson, cofounder of Immutable, gave the example of 1047 Games using the tech for its Empulse game today, and he said the company is talking with more than 100 game studios at the moment to bring Immutable Audience to their games as well. He hopes to reach thousands over time.
“We basically doubled the likelihood someone wishlists a game with this,” Ferguson said.
Why now?
Competition for player attention on Steam is accelerating. Steam Next Fest participation
reached a record 4,353 games in June 2026, up 66% year-on-year, while Steam’s monthly active user base grew approximately 18% over the same period.
Studios increasingly market across social, paid advertising, creators, festivals and community, while Steam provides limited visibility into what generates wishlists. Around 80% to 90% of pre-launch Steam wishlists have no attribution path, meaning studios can see their total but usually not which marketing produced them.
“PC game distribution is broken,” said Ferguson. “Developers should be spending their time making great games, but even sophisticated teams still struggle to know what actually drove a wishlist or what the highest-impact action is each week. Mobile has spent a decade building sophisticated growth systems. Audience brings that same discipline to Steam, so studios know what worked, what to do next, and where to double down.”
Custom Growth Plan
Audience generates a customised Growth Plan using real-time performance data and learnings from hundreds of games to identify the highest-priority ways to grow wishlists before launch.
It analyses a game’s Steam page, social content, creators, festivals, paid acquisition and other channels, recommends where to focus next, and updates the plan as new performance data comes in. If social content is failing to attract new players, for example, Audience can identify successful formats from comparable games and recommend new creative angles.
Immutable applied the systems behind Audience while working with Empulse, which grew by more than 300,000 wishlists in under two months and became the 6th most-played demo out of 4,353 games during the June 2026 Steam Next Fest.
Enhanced Attribution
Audience’s Enhanced Attribution combines performance data across Steam, social, paid advertising, creators and other channels to show which activity is driving wishlists, installs and purchases.
In Immutable’s testing, it increased attribution coverage to more than 60% of wishlists, approximately three times the coverage achieved by the next-best attribution approach. Studios can then identify the channels, campaigns and player segments driving wishlist growth and focus investment on players most likely to buy.
Owned Audience
Audience gives studios a player CRM combining marketing and engagement data around individual prospective players, allowing teams to identify high-value segments, understand what converts them, and run personalised outreach ahead of launch.
Across multiple campaigns, Audience has more than doubled wishlist-to-purchase
conversion, including controlled testing with Ubisoft, where personalized engagement
produced a 2.8 times uplift versus relying on Steam alone.
Studios retain these relationships beyond launch for updates, DLC, sequels and future games.
Immutable Audience will be available to pre-launch Steam studios from August 21, 2026. To celebrate the launch, Immutable is offering 1 month of free product access for free to
qualifying games that sign up through the launch announcement.
Immutable builds infrastructure and growth products for game studios, helping developers build, grow and launch games.
Expanding beyond blockchain games
Founded in Sydney in 2018 by James Ferguson, Robbie Ferguson and Alex Connolly,
Immutable has raised more than $300 million from investors including Tencent and worked with more than 700 games and studios, from independent developers to major publishers including Ubisoft and NetMarble.
Immutable was all-in on blockchain games, making it easy for game startups to adopt Web3 gaming practices and adapt to the token economy. But the games never caught on as a massive platform and many of the tokens crashed in price, with consumers and investors taking a bath. Immutable moved on to finding new ways to work with game companies to help them become more successful, Ferguson said.
“We’ve obviously been fundamentally focused on how games grow for a long time, and we thought about how we service all games,” Ferguson said.
He pointed to the success of AppLovin, valued at $103 billion in the stock market, which focuses its business on optimized attribution, acquisition of users and improving game and app profitability.
“It’s a known science, and in Steam or PC distribution, you have billions of dollars of brand spend, and you have zero ability to understand how that translates into success on launch day,” Ferguson said. “And at the same time, you have this trend of growth in games, from 14,000 launched on Steam in 2023 and 20,000 in 2024.”
He added, ” We have a massive increase in supplier content and our ability to distribute it. And so our solution is pretty simple. How do we give developers the same superpowers they have in mobile, but on PC and Steam games?”
The most optimal thing developers and publishers can do is grow their games’ wishlists every week.
“This is what is actually driving people who are likely to purchase the game, and helping them ultimately automate a lot of this work, and so that the developers can instead focus on developing their game,” Ferguson said.
Ferguson said the tech has been in the works for about a year. The main driver has been the company’s confidence that it can deliver improved results.
“We’ve basically been able to take a game and more than double the likelihood a wishlist player purchases the game,” he said. “We build a direct relationship to a player CRM, and then create personalized engagement leading up to the launch of the game. We did that with 1047 Games’ Empulse and with Ubisoft.”
Ferguson said Immutable works with existing game discovery platforms.
“We’re not trying to replace performance marketing channels, but our whole goal is to help optimize creative messaging, figure out what works, and then actually tell you what is driving wishlists across channels, so you can do more of what works,” Ferguson said. “And more than that, we actually tell you who is likely to purchase out of those wishlists because of the attribution data that we have. So we basically benchmarked our ability to attribute wishlists at more than three times other solutions in the market.”
On Apple’s platform, mobile game devs ran into a privacy wall a few years ago after Apple decided to favor player privacy over targeted advertising. Ferguson said that on the PC, Immutable is trying to build a direct relationship between the studio and the players.
“So ultimately, all of this is GDPR-consented, etc. The players are opting in [on privacy warnings], and what this means is these games over time don’t just build an audience for a single release, but they can actually contact that audience and email them for a sequel, a DLC, upcoming games,” Ferguson said. “This means you stop having this one-time acquisition cost, and instead you can build a loyal and compounding audience that allows studios to be more successful over time too, which is what we’re really excited about.”
He added, “Our whole goal at the end of the day is we think studios should have a much easier time distributing and helping players find their games. And right now the system is very difficult for they have to be both a world-class growth expert and a world-class game building and development expert.”
Ferguson Immutable has the benefit of direct attribution where the player signs up through the Immutable Audience platform and there is also probabalistic attribution, where there is consent for tracking.
As for blockchain games, Ferguson said the company still runs that part of the business, which has shrunk in general over time. There’s no blockchain tech in the PC/console platform.
“Our whole goal is we want to help games,” he said.