Arbitrum Orbit for gaming: Why are so many game rollups getting built on it?

Fortune Business Insights, a leading publication dealing in market research, has concluded that by 2030, since the  Web 3 gaming ecosystem has matured so fast, it can reach $614B in market cap. 

However, such claims can remain superficial if games can’t overcome key barriers obstructing their smooth run. In this regard, Arbitrum Orbit chains,  as a preferred go-to blockchain, have helped games attain their project-specific needs to attain their true potential. 

In this blog, we will explore what made projects choose Arbitrum Orbit for their gaming application, what benefits they might be getting here on Orbit, and many other key aspects that any game developer would want to know before they make the decision on where to build their next super game. 

In the article, we took a slightly different approach. Instead of taking random games and analyzing their data, we segregated them into three categories. 

We have analyzed multiple aspects and come to the conclusion that there could be three reasons a project ended up in the Orbit ecosystem. 

1. They were a gaming dApp on other L1 chains and migrated to an Arbitrum Orbit infrastructure. 

2. There are some games that are running on an L2 that want to migrate to Arbitrum Orbit.

3. These are new games that have chosen Orbit as their preferred stack for gaming.  

We took at least three games from all these categories and tried to see why they have migrated, what they are looking to build, and what their team thinks of this step. 

I hope this will be an interesting read. 

1. Aurory

Aurory is a free-to-play blockchain-based tactical Japanese Game that has been built on top of the Solana chain. This game follows a P2E or Play-To-Earn model, in which players compete with each other using nefties, which is an NFT. As they play, the value of their NFTs is appreciated, and they can use these NFTs for staking, trading, and in-game purchases. 

However, one key constraint that the users faced in the Aurory gaming ecosystem was cross-chain blockchain communication. Why? Because Aurory was deployed on Solana, which is not EVM compatible.

As a result, if users wanted to connect to other blockchains, which are EVM compatible, to tap into better opportunity costs, they had to use Phantom or Solflare. This mid-way chain traffic made UX complex. 

Finally, they decided to move onto an Arbitrum orbit chain. 

Integrating the Arbitrum Orbit optimistic rollups for gaming on Aurory allowed the Aurory ecosystem to ensure seamless cross-chain operations at a fraction of the cost. Hence, for Aurory, launching an optimistic rollup chain via Arbitrum was not to minimize the transaction cost or improve the scalability. 

Rather, the entire move revolved around expanding the Aurory ecosystem to a wider blockchain network where Solana, despite not being an EVM equivalent blockchain, can tap into the EVM chain for better liquidity and participation sans complexities and at a much lower cost. 

Aurory Executive Producer Jonathan Campeau says, “For us, really, we need to branch out a little bit from a pure business point of view. We just want to open more doors for players because we understand that Solana has a specific audience. 

And Arbitrum has developed its own culture and its own audience and community. For the greater good of the community, if both these chains can co-mingle and the players can enjoy, for the first time, the one-of-a-kind on-ramps and off-ramps across a wider blockchain network for better usability and improved experience through its optimistic rollup features on Arbitrum Orbit for gaming . Such a feat can take the gaming experience to the next level, and when that happens sans bridges, it is like a cake with a cherry on top for next-level Web 3 gaming adoption. 

2. Wall Street Game 

Wall Street Game (WSG) is a play-to-earn multiplayer hybrid blockchain game that allows players to play and collect NFTs in the game environment to redeem them for utility tokens. In the long run, Wallet Street Game’s vision has been to introduce an MLP status or a Multiplayer Status. Such a pursuit demands very high scalability. 

To cater to that vision, WSG envisioned moving from the BSC Chain to Arbitrum Orbit for gaming  because they wanted to introduce a wide array of features like multiplayer functionality and tap into grant programs and partnership opportunities on the Arbitrum chain.  

In addition to this, they wanted to introduce a new currency/token on the WSG ecosystem termed gold. For that to hold, they need to lock gold bearings in vaults to mint a synthetic gold token on the WSG ecosystem that will appreciate gold prices and game XPs. Hence, in this pursuit of innovation and growth through the introduction of a real asset-backed token, Arbitrum’s efficiency and scalability provided everything that the WSG ecosystem wanted to go live and dominate the game ecosystem in a completely new avatar. 

3. Game of Silk 

Game of Silk introduced a new concept where real-horse racing could be brought into sync with the digital world. To put that into perspective, they wanted to create an environment where the ranches go live online ideally, and the stallions can be up for real. 

However, one key constraint that Game of Silk faced was limited throughput on the Ethereum chain during peak hours. 

Game of Silk wanted to amplify the GameFi user experience, and for that matter, they chose the ORU tech stack in the form of Arbitrum Orbit because they were looking at a 10x to 100x scale with a 10x to 100x lesser cost. In addition to this, the compatibility and developer tools must be easier to integrate and launch the game in a flash. 

In this regard, the Orbit tech stack was chosen because since Arbitrum Orbit has been rapidly growing, new verticals and user experiences will proliferate in a secure, cheap, and fast execution environment, said A.J. Warner, Chief Strategy Officer of Offchain Labs. 

As Michael Lira, Head of Technology for Silks, says, it should be seemingly easier for users to use our gaming ecosystem. The trade-offs that Orbit stack provides have helped us to integrate advanced game utility features without significant complexities and improve the gameplay experience. 

4. Pirate Nation 

Pirate Nation is a free-to-play gaming Dapp built on a pirate theme. This game helps players explore pirate expeditions. In the expedition, the players can mint NFTs, increase their XPs and trade those XPs for utility tokens on any marketplace. 

However, one key constraint that Pirate Nation and other gaming Dapps face is restricting users to a single-chain environment. Pirate Nations and other Web 3 games across wider segments like MMORPG and PVP want to have predictable gas costs, quick block times, horizontal scaling architecture, and extensive cross-chain interaction. 

In this regard, they wanted to launch on a blockchain that is fast, scalable, flexible, and cheap. Arbitrum Nova, as an optimistic rollup chain for gaming, has provided Pirate Nation with a Proof of Play Multi Chain ecosystem, incentivizing them to move from Polygon to Arbitrum because games need a multi-chain ecosystem to simplify trading NFTs, staking, and experiencing in-game environments in a completely gas-optimized manner. 

However, the present Polygon ecosystem that Pirate Nation was using compelled them to interact through a smart contract that was powering their gaming Dapp. Due to such a practice, it had become quite costly to run their game on-chain because either Pirate Nation could integrate a pre-authorization method with a single transaction for execution, or the gaming ecosystem could bypass the entire transaction cost. 

In both these ways, the game studio, Pirate Nation, will have to bear the cost. With such an approach, if the game environment has millions of users, it would ideally trigger a scalability bottleneck and bankrupt the gaming ecosystem. 

Arbitrum Nova, an optimistic rollup chain, helped them overcome this issue since Nova blended well with Open Zepplin security products and nodes already in the game, which was difficult with Polygon Supernet and Avalanche Subnet. 

As a result, Pirate Nation could immediately subsidize the gas cost by $3000 to $4000 daily without compelling the game to store some operations, like gameplay code and other core elements, off-chain while the crypto tokens and NFTs are on-chain. In this way, it has significantly impacted the Dapp experience by eliminating any unnecessary lags and glitches while playing these games. 

The CEO of Pirate Nation says, “Arbitrum Nova  Optimistic Rollup Chain is a particularly strong fit for our gaming ecosystem, given our ambition is to build fully on-chain games that are indistinguishable from their off-chain counterparts in terms of speed and scale.” Arbitrum Optimistic Rollups for gaming  have provided an edge in launching games that provide users with near-expected UI/UX. 

5. Playnance 

Playnance is a B2B Web platform engineered so that influencers can monetize their traffic by onboarding them in the game and letting them do activities inside the gaming environment. However, one key constraint with the Playnance ecosystem is that while operating on Polygon and contributing 10% to all the POS Polygon transactions, the users had to pay excessive gas because every activity involved communicating with the smart contract. 

To help overcome this, because their objective is to scale from 2500 users monthly to more in the coming months, abstracting functions so that it can eliminate the gas cost ended up being a necessary evil. Hence, they are planning to launch PlayBlock, a gaming Layer-3 ecosystem powered by Arbitrum Orbit using Optimistic rollups. 

Playnance is choosing Arbitrum Orbit for gaming because its future designs demand extensive flexibility and customizability, such as bypassing gas costs and abstracting UX. They also want a multi-chain game environment where users/influencers can tap into their fanbase on different gaming chains sans complexities.

In this regard, the CTO at Playnanace, Roman Levi, says, “Launching our dedicated chain is a natural evolution of Playnance’s vision as one of the leading peer-to-peer web3 gaming platforms.” 

Their ambition is driven by the goal of combining the benefits of Web3 on-chain gaming with the fun and accessibility of traditional games, all without the Web3 complexity.” Arbitrum Orbit Anytrust chain allows Relayers, VRF, Functions, and Account Abstraction to be integrated into the game from scratch with very limited coding.

In addition to this, Arbitrum Orbit’s Anytrust chain would help in achieving a 250ms block time and near-instant finality. As a result, the gaming  ecosystem will be  capable of achieving thousands of transactions throughput per second to meet its varying demands. 

Furthermore, Playnance will also introduce a PBG token, which will allow near-zero gas transactions to help onboard more users to its ecosystem through Orbit’s native gas token feature. All of these are possible if there’s no verification and continuous interaction with the smart contract for every single execution because Playnance’s vision was to onboard thousands of games and millions of gamers on its ecosystem with a Web 2 gaming experience. 

6. Hytopia 

Hytopia is a better version of the Minecraft game that restores the power to the hands of the community. The game was initially built using Polygon Edge to power up its ecosystem. However, in late 2023, the Polygon ecosystem dropped off the support for the Polygon Edge software. Since the game was deployed on Polygon Edge, the game environment was required to make all the fixes that would help the ecosystem sync with the new rules of the ecosystem. 

In order to do that, they would have to adjust the tech stack, which would compromise the speed and increase the block production time. On the contrary, the Hytopia ecosystem wanted to reduce block times by 50%. But shifting to a new Polygon tech stack made that to 1.1s~ of block time. 

The Arbitrum Orbit for gaming  AnyTrust chain significantly improved that to 250 ms to 500 ms block times. Since the Arbitrum Orbit uses ORUs, it reduced the chain bloating and improved the throughput significantly. 

7. Zeeverse 

Zeeverse is a free-to-play MMORPG monster tamer game with an amplified PVE and PVP mode, which bundles specific NFT features to give a near-unprecedented gaming experience. In the Zeeverse, you get the chance to play the role of a Master Chief who controls the land NFTs and their activities for profits. However, one problem that Zeeverse faced while aligning with this objective was providing near-infinite customization to its users, such as gasless transactions to the playing counterparts to interact with the ecosystem. 

In this regard, the Arbitrum Orbit ecosystem provided the Zeeverse ecosystem with the ability to either create its own tokens or use the native tokens for in-game interaction using the Optimistic rollup chain. 

The trade-off  Zeeverse experienced was that the Arbitrum Orbit Optimistic rollup chain for gaming provided a dedicated gaming arm and incentive model through the Arbitrum DAO, which has the funds necessary to positively impact Zeeverse’s growth. For example, look at the graph. 

Other than ImmutableX, Arbitrum only has most of the games moving to its ecosystem because of customization, which has significantly reduced the impact of running your own game in an L2 chain. 

As a result,  not just Zeeverse but other games like Stella Fantasy, Planet Mojo, Affyn, MetalCore, and TastuMeeko want to tap into the Arbitrum Orbit ecosystem to launch an Optimistic rollup chain for gaming because the Arbitrium Orbit ecosystem provides near-low gas transaction along with financial support, expertise and guidance, marketing & promotion, distribution channel and access to resources has helped simplify game development, deployment and marketing in the manner that most appeal to users. 

On the contrary, on ImmutableX or Starknet, the cost of running on top of those rollup environments was comparatively higher. 

8. Anomaly 

Anomaly is a new emerging gaming ecosystem with the vision to merge SocialFi with gaming. To do that, they need lower transaction time and instant finality because the vision is to onboard 900 M Telegram users through airdrops. However, to achieve this pursuit, they need to keep the gas cost very low when interacting with the users. 

Optimistic rollups allowed the Anomaly ecosystem to provide zero gas cost and instant finality. They also wanted to introduce account abstraction so that Telegram users could be easily onboarded on their ecosystem. Arbitrum Anytrust DAC technology allowed them to achieve all of that through customized features and a permissionless interface allowing near  minimal gas or gas less  payments. The after effect of this integration allowed  smart advanced features like  AI integration in  games for  matchmaking specific profiles, executing AI powered decision-making to meet and greet respective platform users and a player model training, automated quest creation, and asset generation to be implemented in the gaming ecosystem. Hence , making them choose the Arbitrum Orbit so that they can secure all of the above tasks in a seamless cost effective and flexible manner. 

9. Sparta Dex

SpartaDex is a unique gaming ecosystem that has fused a cryptocurrency exchange and a real-time strategy game set dating back to ancient Greece to take the gaming experience to the next level. 

On SpartaDex, users can mint rarible tokens by breeding and upgrading them and allowing them for sale across a wider gaming ecosystem. However, such a pursuit demands that the SpartaDex gaming ecosystem be connected to all other gaming ecosystems in a simple manner. 

Arbitrum Orbit creates a one-chain thesis for all the gaming ecosystem, and SpartaDex allows NFTs minted on the SpartaDex ecosystem to be easily traded across different gaming ecosystems in a cost-effective and seamless manner. 

Through Orbit, not only is the cross-ecosystem NFT exchange simplified, but users also incur very little fee because SpartaDex has real income and a token commitment. These tokens can help users generate lucrative income. 

However, the staking process across protocols with higher returns should be cost-effective and simple. For that reason, SpartaDEX has turned towards Optimistic RollUps that provide lesser costs transacting with different ecosystems built on top of SpartDex. 

Zeeve is the preferred infrastructure implementation partner for Arbitrum orbit rollups. Businesses can launch their custom Orbit testnet and mainnet chains using Zeeve’s Rollups-as-a-Service platform. Zeeve also provides a 1-click Sandbox tool for Arbitrum Orbit chain deployment on DevNet, along with the choice of on/off-chain data availability, centralized/decentralized sequencers, and other crucial integrations, monitoring, and alerts. This will allow the team to try different rollup configurations and test smart contracts before making them live on production. 

All the Arbitrum Orbit rollups deployed through the Zeeve RaaS get comprehensive middleware, including faucets, cross-chain bridges, block explorers, and indexers, along with 30+ trusted third-party integrations. 

If you are planning to launch your own Arbitrum Orbit rollup for gaming, don’t hesitate to reach out to us. Our experts can help you identify the best infrastructure suitable for your use case. Schedule a call today!