Ethereum.org rebuilds its gaming page, and mainnet games get top billing

In Brief:

• A rewritten version of ethereum.org/gaming is live, built around four sections: the history of gaming on Ethereum, games running on mainnet, the L2 gaming ecosystem and NFT design.
• The page argues games are coming back to Ethereum L1 as it scales, and points to Asphodel, a fully onchain title in playtesting on mainnet.
• Ronin, which hard forked into an OP Stack layer 2 on May 12, said it’s the first L2 named on the page.

Ethereum.org has shipped a rewritten version of its gaming page, and the section that will get the most attention isn’t about layer 2s. It’s about mainnet.

The page says that as L1 scales, games are starting to return to Ethereum mainnet, and it names Asphodel as the working example: a fully onchain game currently in playtesting on Ethereum L1. That’s a departure from the past several years, in which nearly every serious onchain title moved to an L2 for cheaper fees and faster confirmation.

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

What’s in it

The new version is organized into four parts: the full story of gaming on Ethereum, mainnet gaming, the Ethereum gaming ecosystem and gaming NFT innovation.

Asphodel: Prologue is a roguelike autobattler. Players mint a Taruchi, train it, shape its build and send it into an arena to fight. Asphodel Studios also built Kamigotchi, the onchain pet strategy game.

The ecosystem section features Ronin, which spent four years as an independent Ethereum sidechain before hard forking at block 55,577,490 on May 12 to become an OP Stack layer 2. EigenDA handles data availability for the new chain while Ethereum provides settlement and finality. The network went into what Sky Mavis co-founder Jihoz called “hibernation” for roughly 10 hours during the switch.

The economics changed with it. RON inflation dropped from more than 20% a year to below 1% under a new Proof of Distribution model, and marketplace fees rose from 0.5% to 1.25%. Ronin launched in February 2021 to absorb Axie Infinity (official site)’s transaction load, and its sidechain design was the setting for the $625 million bridge exploit in March 2022.

NFTs as game state

The NFT section skips ownership arguments and goes straight to mechanics.

Beast NFTs in Loot Survivor store species, tier, level, health, combat type and defeat history fully onchain. The first player to kill a named Beast mints it. That Beast then keeps appearing in every other player’s dungeon, and every subsequent death to it gets written into its metadata, with rewards flowing to whoever owns it. No central server coordinates any of that.

Gigaverse (official site) takes a different angle. Its ROM NFTs work as factories, producing materials and resources over time, so a player owns manufacturing capacity rather than a single item. The page also cites Abstract’s Cambria and its “Core” NFTs, which let players mint pets and skins instead of buying them through a storefront.

A split on gas

The page doesn’t pretend the ecosystem agrees on fees. It sets two positions against each other.

Kamigotchi, on Initia, treats gas paid by players as direct revenue. The Realms.World ecosystem on Starknet runs the Cartridge Paymaster so play costs nothing in gas, on the view that fees are an obstacle to the player experience. Both models are presented as live, not as one correct answer.

Sorted by genre, not by chain

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

Under 4X and grand strategy: Conquest.eth, a permissionless game of space conquest and diplomacy where players stake tokens on planets, and Realms, where land NFTs mine resources and raise armies. Dark Forest sits in the same bucket, credited with pioneering the genre through its ZK-proof fog of war, and now maintained as a community fork by DFArchon.

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

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