Every time I see those white papers claiming to revolutionize the traditional gaming industry with blockchain games, I have an extremely absurd illusion, as if just writing the ownership of a broken wooden sword on the blockchain will make players willingly endure the rough graphics and outrageous interaction delays reminiscent of the Famicom from the last century. Developers in this industry seem to have fallen into an extremely bizarre technical self-indulgence, frantically engaging in an arms race over ZKP algorithms and data availability layers, yet failing to grasp even the most basic client access experience. Recently, to help a friend who is developing an indie game evaluate the asset on-chain solution, I explored the mainstream game public chain SDKs available on the market. Originally having high expectations for Immutable X, I found myself deeply reflecting after experiencing the underlying network that bears the strong imprint of the early metaverse. What kind of gaming infrastructure do we really need?
It is undeniable that IMX has achieved extremes in handling high-frequency trading and zero-fee packaging, but when you want to integrate its API into a AAA masterpiece that has already been half-developed with Unreal Engine, you will find that it is simply a nightmare. You need to specifically hire a few engineers who understand Solidity to forcibly interrupt the originally smooth game loop to adapt to that inhumane asynchronous on-chain verification logic. In contrast, this architecture, which attempts to directly reduce the application layer to attack the underlying, seems much sneakier. When I tested the Unity prefab they provided, I found that it didn’t resemble a blockchain project development kit at all; it looked more like a recharge access module for a mature mobile gaming platform. You don’t need to understand what a state channel is, nor do you need to comprehend how a Merkle tree is constructed. Just drag and drop, configure parameters, call methods, and the originally cumbersome asset minting and flow logic is tightly encapsulated. This approach of forcibly stuffing the underlying ledger into the industrial pipeline of the game engine is what truly allows Web2 giants to let down their guard.
But don’t think for a second that this set of things is flawless; it carries an extremely heavy historical burden. The brand imprint that has continued since the Virtua era makes many people still view it through colored glasses, believing that it is nothing more than a group of NFT traders who cannot produce results trying to cash in on the hotspots of AI and high-performance L1. This prejudice has caused great fragmentation in the early community consensus. Moreover, although they hold traditional IP authorizations at the level of Godzilla, the current on-chain ecosystem still remains in an extremely awkward vacuum state. You have built an extremely luxurious e-sports arena filled with the most top-of-the-line equipment, even the chairs are ergonomically customized, but when you open the door, you find that there isn't even a player for Contra inside. Ronin can rely on Axie's massive Southeast Asian promotional base to forcibly create an ecological barrier, Gala can maintain heat through its extremely multi-level marketing style node sales, but this network currently, aside from occasionally releasing seemingly impressive technical update reports, has made virtually no achievements in attracting real C-end player traffic.
When I deeply experienced the highly touted AI-assisted development tool, I even felt a sense of frustration from being deceived by marketing rhetoric. The promotion claims that you can generate complex on-chain game logic using natural language directly, but after I input a few slightly convoluted royalty distribution requirements, the code it generated was still full of extremely basic syntax errors, and in the end, I still had to rewrite the underlying contract myself. This practice of excessively raising technical expectations is actually very detrimental to goodwill. What’s even more concerning are those advanced features that severely rely on centralized cloud nodes; if you want to achieve those extremely cool on-chain AI interactions, you must bow to those privileged nodes deployed on Google Cloud. In the eyes of those extremely purist chain game developers, this is simply an unforgivable degradation. They would rather endure the stuttering of full-chain games than hand over the life and death power of data back to the Web2 giants.
From the perspective of extremely utilitarian secondary speculation, the current market trend completely reflects the extreme weakness of this ecological cold start period. Although the chips are fully circulated, there is a lack of strong market makers to maintain depth, resulting in its price being extremely torturous, hovering around $0.008 for a long time. However, this extremely desperate bottoming period is precisely the touchstone to validate whether its business logic can work. It does not need to compete with Solana in the wealth creation effect of Meme coins; it just needs to secure a few second-tier traditional game studios and seamlessly migrate their games, which have real recharge flows, over. The token consumption mechanism written in the economic model will be instantly activated. It's like betting whether a bankrupt restructured industrial park can successfully attract investment; the land price is extremely cheap now, the infrastructure has already been laid out, and the only thing missing is a leading enterprise that can bring in tens of thousands of industrial workers. In this cycle filled with air narratives, this type of asset with a hint of industrial heavy metal can at least allow you to see that the project team is honestly submitting code on GitHub while you're trapped.