Been following web3 gaming and honestly confused why more people aren't talking about how broken the experience is on mainnet. Tried playing a few different blockchain games and the transaction confirmation times make everything feel laggy even when the game itself runs smooth.
Like you'll be playing something that needs quick decisions and you make a move then have to wait 10-15 seconds for it to confirm on-chain. Completely kills any sense of real-time gameplay, your brain just registers it as the game being slow and broken even though technically it's working fine.
I get that L2s exist but seems like most games are still launching on mainnet or shared infrastructure where they're competing with DeFi and NFT traffic during peak hours. Gaming traffic patterns are so different, you get these huge spikes during events and tournaments, not the steady load that most blockchain apps have.
Is this just something gamers are supposed to accept or are there actually solutions that make web3 games feel as responsive as normal games? Because right now it seems like blockchain gaming has a fundamental UX problem that nobody's really solving.
why doesn't ethereum scaling for games get more attention, the ux problems are massive
byu/Sea_Weather5428 inethereum
Posted by Sea_Weather5428
2 Comments
this is why serious web3 games need dedicated infrastructure instead of sharing block space with thousands of other apps. we moved our game to caldera with dedicated throughput and transaction confirmations stay under 1 second even during peak traffic
Well it doesn’t get attention because the user numbers are tiny, you have a few thousand unique users at most with most of these games. Really it’s an industry that’s a decade away from being relevant imo- and I’m someone who has made over 100k transactions on a certain web3 game so I have some perspective.
But yes, you’re right in one way, main-net doesn’t make a lot of sense as a primary settlement layer for micro transactions, although the majority of games are on L2’s anyway. But more to the point most of these games are just designed in the wrong way, very little of the gaming functions should exist on-chain, it should primarily be a settlement function for ownership transactions.
L2’s like MegaETH will probably provide more real-time capabilities but it’s a big risk for Devs to actually invest in this stuff, in 2021 and beyond it was only possible because of VC funding but that time is well and truly over. And that relates to the economics of the game loop too- I haven’t seen an on-chain game yet that’s sustainable, and it’s even worse when they issue their own token.