Onchain Games Are Getting Faster

A fully onchain game stores all its logic, including assets, rules, and state, on a blockchain or rollup.

In contrast to mainstream titles that run on private, siloed servers and where players have little sovereignty, the decentralized approach of onchain games offers players asset ownership, open economics, open modding, persistence, and transparency.

This design space is only a handful of years old though, so two areas where onchain games have lagged behind their mainstream counterparts so far is slick UX (i.e. ease of use) and speed (i.e. low latency).

The good news is the ecosystem is turning the corner here in both regards.

Account abstraction innovations are currently working well to solve the UX woes. For example, Eternum Season 1 gameplay started today, and my Cartridge Controller let me generate my Eternum wallet and launch session keys just by signing in with my Discord account.

But another wave I'm seeing right now that's going to be a boon for fully onchain games is the infra trend toward speed, i.e. low-latency block times.

If you're not familiar with it, latency is the time delay between a player's action and the in-game outcome of that action. In mainstream online games, latency is the time it takes for data to travel from a player's device to the game server and back.

In onchain games, this same principle applies, but the server is replaced by the network or rollup where game logic is executed and state is updated.

All that said, an ideal latency for online games is between 30 and 60 milliseconds (ms), as this speed offers a smooth and responsive experience for most players; anything above 300 ms feels sluggish.

Contrast this ideal with the Ethereum L1, which currently has an average block time of 12 seconds or 12,000 ms. To be sure, you can still build onchain games on Ethereum, but its high latency makes real-time competitive games here impractical.

Yet elsewhere things are much faster, and in some cases, getting even faster soon.

For instance, consider Base. It currently has block times of 2 seconds, and this performance is set to drop to 200 ms once Flashblocks arrive on its mainnet in the coming weeks. This upgrade will pave the way for much faster games to be played on the L2, and more may follow it.

Of course, another must-mention L2 here is MegaETH. Only its testnet is live for now, but it boasts a unique mini-blocks design that can produce blocks every 10 ms.

In esports contexts, 20 ms or below is considered superb, so MegaETH has major potential to support a thriving competitive gaming scene. If you want an early taste of the speed here, you can try the real-time Crossy Fluffle game today on the L2's testnet.

As far as other L1s go, Solana also has big potential in this arena. The network has a block propagation system that uses "shreds," and this mechanism can achieve latency of around 15 ms, which is excellent for gaming use cases.

Another interesting wrinkle here is community solutions, like the MagicBlock onchain game engine. It offers a bespoke ephemeral rollups architecture that can help Solana apps achieve block times of ~10 ms. A title building on this stack is Supersize, a multiplayer memecoin eater game.

So as new fast chains launch like MegaETH, and as existing networks get faster with innovations like shreds and Flashbocks, we're entering a new frontier where fully onchain games can finally match the low latency afforded by mainstream games' private servers.

This trend paves the way for new kinds of advanced onchain games with real-time gameplay, and the bigger picture here is that a competitive, player-owned onchain esports scene is now decisively within our reach.

Of course, the push toward lower latency doesn't guarantee great games, but it does remove one of the last technical blockers that stood in the way of making the kinds of games onchain that many of us have come to love and expect. New breakthrough titles are on the horizon accordingly.