Ethereum.org overhauls its gaming hub — and puts mainnet titles front and centre

In Brief:

• ethereum.org/gaming has been rewritten and is now live, structured around four sections: the history of gaming on Ethereum, games running on mainnet, the L2 gaming ecosystem and NFT design.
• As Ethereum L1 scales, the page makes the case that games are returning to it, citing Asphodel — a fully onchain title currently in playtesting on mainnet.
• Ronin, which hard forked into an OP Stack layer 2 on May 12, said it is the first L2 named on the page.

Ethereum.org has published a rewritten version of its gaming page, and the part likely to draw the most attention has nothing to do with layer 2s. It concerns mainnet.

According to the page, games are beginning to come back to Ethereum mainnet as L1 scales, and it offers Asphodel as the working example: a fully onchain game in playtesting on Ethereum L1 right now. That marks a break with the last several years, during which almost every serious onchain title decamped to an L2 in search of cheaper fees and quicker confirmation.

“Gaming is at home on Ethereum,” said nejc, who posts as @heynejc, in the post that announced the refresh.

What’s in it

Four parts make up the new version: the full story of gaming on Ethereum, mainnet gaming, the Ethereum gaming ecosystem and gaming NFT innovation.

Asphodel: Prologue is a roguelike autobattler. A player mints a Taruchi, trains it, decides how to build it, then sends it into an arena to fight. Kamigotchi, the onchain pet strategy game, is also the work of Asphodel Studios.

Ronin headlines the ecosystem section. It ran as an independent Ethereum sidechain for four years before hard forking at block 55,577,490 on May 12 to become an OP Stack layer 2. Data availability for the new chain is handled by EigenDA, with Ethereum supplying settlement and finality. Sky Mavis co-founder Jihoz described the roughly 10 hours the network spent offline during the switch as “hibernation.”

The economics were reworked alongside it. A new Proof of Distribution model cut RON inflation from more than 20% a year to below 1%, while marketplace fees climbed from 0.5% to 1.25%. Ronin first launched in February 2021 to take on Axie Infinity (official site)’s transaction load, and it was that sidechain design that became the setting for the $625 million bridge exploit in March 2022.

NFTs as game state

Rather than rehearse ownership arguments, the NFT section heads straight for mechanics.

In Loot Survivor, Beast NFTs hold species, tier, level, health, combat type and defeat history entirely onchain. Whoever kills a named Beast first gets to mint it. From then on that Beast turns up in every other player’s dungeon, each subsequent death to it is written into its metadata, and rewards flow to its owner. None of it is coordinated by a central server.

Gigaverse (official site) approaches it differently. Its ROM NFTs behave like factories, generating materials and resources over time, which means a player holds manufacturing capacity instead of a single item. The page also points to Cambria, on Abstract, and its “Core” NFTs, which allow players to mint pets and skins rather than purchase them from a storefront.

A split on gas

There is no pretence that the ecosystem has settled the fee question. The page places two positions side by side.

Kamigotchi, running on Initia, counts the gas players pay as direct revenue. Over on Starknet, the Realms.World ecosystem uses the Cartridge Paymaster so that playing costs nothing in gas, working from the position that fees get in the way of the player experience. Neither is framed as the correct answer — both are simply presented as live.

Sorted by genre, not by chain

Titles are grouped by what they actually are. The MMO bucket holds Cambria’s Gold Rush, a seasonal game with PvP and extraction mechanics; ForTheKingdom, an onchain strategy title built around large-scale faction warfare; and Axie Infinity: Atia’s Legacy, the MMO on Ronin featuring PvE dungeons and PvP battles.

4X and grand strategy covers Conquest.eth — a permissionless game of space conquest and diplomacy in which players stake tokens on planets — and Realms, where land NFTs mine resources and raise armies. Dark Forest belongs to the same category, credited with pioneering the genre via its ZK-proof fog of war and now kept alive as a community fork by DFArchon.

Loot Survivor falls under dungeon crawlers and roguelikes, characterised as fully onchain permadeath runs with verifiable high scores.

Ronin, for its part, treated the page as a scoreboard. “Ronin is Ethereum’s newest L2 and the first one listed!” the network said.