Blockchains Today Are Not Gaming Ready

Having seen unprecedented growth over the past decade, the global gaming industry now stands in a league of its own. In 2021, it was reported to be worth over $180 billion, with more than 3.24 billion gamers across the globe. Of course, the global pandemic has influenced these stats to a significant extent. Nevertheless, the industry is huge and is expected to surpass $545 billion by 2028. And all of this is without the integration of blockchain taken into account. 

When we add blockchain to the mix, everything grows exponentially. The opportunities, the users, and the market cap. This is because blockchain opens new dimensions in gaming, creating virtual economies, fully immersive experiences, and community-owned games. And while all this sounds really impressive on paper, the implementation of these features is a challenge that most blockchains aren’t prepared for.  

It all started in 2017 with the famous blockchain-based collectible game CryptoKitties. While it was quite minimal in terms of gameplay and user experience, it made use of blockchain’s signature characteristics — decentralization, transparency, and digital assets — thus introducing the potential of blockchain gaming to the world. 

For gamers who have long suffered from the centralized nature of online games, this was the holy grail. Blockchain can transfer the ownership of the entire game including in-game resources, avatars, and assets to the community. The community of players can modify games to their liking, sell gaming resources, save their progress on-chain, and even use resources of one game in another. In simple terms, this is decentralization and community ownership at its best. 

And certainly, there’s this whole virtual economy and the play-to-earn model that gives a whole new meaning to gaming by rewarding players for their time and effort. 

While all this sounds like a dream come true, the problem is that the proper implementation of these features is not as easy as it seems, at least with present-day architecture. Issues like scalability have long troubled blockchain users. Even simple games like CryptoKitties have managed to crash the underlying blockchain networks with a sudden influx of users. Imagine having to incorporate 3.24 billion users and more. To accommodate such a wide user base, blockchains have to be extremely scalable, right now, truth be told, they’re nowhere near it. In fact, already successful blockchain games are migrating from chain to chain in search of scalability. 

Then there’s also the problem of speed. Players who are used to the webscale speeds with online gaming are struggling to make peace with the blockchain speeds. Even the fastest blockchains of today are no match for the web. In such cases, the gameplay and the gaming experience both suffer tremendously. In recent times, however, we’ve seen the rise of scalability and speed-focused blockchain networks like the Binance Smart Chain (BSC). With a speed of 55 to 60 transactions per second, this might seem like a really good alternative to Ethereum. But, there’s a catch. BSC significantly compromises on decentralization to achieve this speed. The network has only 21 validators and given the fact that decentralization is a unique characteristic of blockchain gaming, this might be a huge compromise to make. 

Now, one of the contributing factors to speed is the underlying computational power and for the implementation of complex games at high speeds, the requirement could be huge. This is because everyone running the blockchain is required to compute every state of the smart contract. This is quite evident with the Solana. Solana has been touted as the champion for speed and scalability with an estimated 50,000 transactions per second. But the hardware resources for maintaining a network like this are huge when compared to competitor networks. Solana’s novel approach of parallelizing transactions, though very effective, mandates every validator to have a GPU, and the costs associated with an architecture like this could be astronomical. 

Of course, there are also other networks like Polygon and Flow that have more or less managed to solve the blockchain trilemma. But for gaming on blockchains to really thrive, application-specific blockchains could be the way forward. This might sound a bit absurd but hear us out. 

Blockchain gaming protocols have long been dealing with these problems in their own way. Some of them have even retorted to sacrificing the decentralization of the game which undermines the whole point of blockchain gaming. But the real solution probably lies in creating a network of application-specific blockchains. This might sound a bit absurd but hear us out. 

Online games are not merely games but universes in their own sense. So, it is only fair for every gaming universe to have a blockchain that is specifically made to suit its needs. While this might not solve all the problems, it largely eliminates the scope of network congestion and lack of scalability that happens on chains like Ethereum where millions of users are using the chain for millions of different things. This, in turn, could increase the speeds and make it possible for developers to fine-tune the user experience to the gamers’ needs. The in-game resources and progress of gamers could also be etched into the blockchain to run forever.