ETH CC Gaming Recap 🇫🇷 | Skill Tree # 26
Had a great time in Paris, was lovely to meet old and new friends!
Here’s a recap of gaming-related talks from the main event.
The State of Web3 Native Games
Blockchains are a new platform for games. Similar to mobile, this provides games with a new business model, which changes how games are built
It’s unclear yet what it really changes - there’s no blueprint
potential pointers where it might go imo:
a) financialized gameplay with strong PVP and DAO/guild components as these motivate spending for social status within the in-group and to win against the outgroup. focus on risk management, strategy, and other meta gameplay
b) loop economies that regularly die and start from new, incorporating learnings. caps ROI of game assets and prevents wealth gaps between players which usually increase over time
c) Games-as-a-platform on steroids
Mobile: Could make Flappy Birds on a console but the monetization system around games changed
On-chain games face several challenges while the benefits are uncertain → few teams are building
Potential value-add: New relationship for builders - building collaboratively, open-source (concept of autonomous worlds)
Tackling scalability and design patterns: Engines like Dojo, Argus, MUD
Tackling UX/UI: Alembic, Cartridge, Ethos
Hardcore tech challenges in fully on-chain gaming
Tech challenges: thoughput, gasless tx, decentralization & security, costs, UX (e.g. wallets), enabling secret information (e.g. fog of war), building extensibility into the game, ensuring trading liquidity
Having an own rollup offers a couple of benefits: gas isolation leading to lower fees, high throughput, low costs, customizability (e.g. zk precompiles for secret information; sponsored tx)
Rollup vs chain: better security per unit of cost
cheaper because needs like stakers (only an adequate number of sequencers) and can use restaking
future: marketplace for sequencers, shared sequencers for trustless cross-rollup bridging
While a game-specific rollup gives a developer control, it may also come with higher costs and lower trading liquidity compared to cross-game rollups (e.g. publisher rollup with multiple games on it). Sequencer costs can’t be shared (trade-off with gas isolation), infra needs to be ready (e.g. RPCs, block explorers), and liquidiry fragmentation needs to be solved.
Questions:
At which player size does it make sense to run your own L2?
L2 vs L3?
L1 = cities, L2s = malls, L3s = shops? A lot of smaller shops require a mall/other shops around to bring an audience
Account abstraction (EIP-4337) helps tackle UX
Gaming and the Metaverse: Where are we now?
4 key trends
AI everywhere: generate visual assets (especially prototyping), human-like NPCs
Middleware developer tooling (e.g. embedded marketplaces, wallets, etc.): Animoca is seeing a lot of pitch decks
AAA games teams building in web3 e.g. NFL Rivals, Summoners War Chronicles, CCP Games, Life Beyond
Interoperability: e.g. Sandboy working with NFT communities like BAYC, Coolcats, Clone X etc → UA strategy