The Merge: How will it affect blockchain gaming?
If 2021 was the year of play-to-earn (P2E), then 2022 is the year of The Merge.
Last year, P2E gained mainstream attention thanks to the success of blockchain gaming companies such as Axie Infinity. P2E opened the eyes of game developers and gamers alike to the power of blockchain as a platform for accelerating innovation, building communities, and rewarding players. Now players can earn cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that have value in the real world.
In fact, the growth of P2E also gave birth to Playfix. We understood that many game developers would not have the time and resources to quickly build and innovate with the blockchain. That’s why we built the Playfix platform: to make it faster and easier for developers to launch web3 games and NFTs.
With Playfix, you can build the backend for your game economy in a day. Something that used to take months.
The Merge has been called the most significant upgrade to the Ethereum blockchain on which many dApps (distributed apps) are built. This refers to the merger of the current proof-of-work (PoW) Ethereum mainnet, with the proof-of-stake (PoS) Beacon Chain, with Ethereum fully migrating to PoS.
Unlike PoW, which requires miners to spend a lot of time and energy to validate transactions, PoS allows validators to stake Ether into a smart contract on Ethereum, acting as collateral. This will reduce Ethereum’s energy consumption by around 99.95 percent.
The question we get asked most by game developers is: “What chain should we use?”
With The Merge, Ethereum will become even more attractive, thanks to better energy efficiency and greater scalability, particularly as sharding is introduced in 2023. Ethereum Co-Founder Vitalik Buterin has referred to this next stage after The Merge as The Surge. This will allow Ethereum to be split into smaller partitions known as shards, further improving scalability.
While moving to PoS does help with scalability, it will not lower gas fees or improve the number of transactions per second — both requirements of blockchain games. Ethereum does have a plan to improve both of these eventually. However, if you’re building a blockchain game and need lower transaction costs and high transactions per second, you’re better off with another chain for now.
In summary, while Ethereum’s move to PoS will provide short-term benefits like consuming drastically less energy, it does not yet make the chain attractive to blockchain games. The move to PoS consensus does, however, help Ethereum move in the right direction as the network of choice for blockchain games. Once lower gas fees and higher transactions per second is achieved, it will be time to consider Ethereum for blockchain games.
Whatever chain developers use, our goal at Playfix is to help by taking care of the infrastructure and technical details.
So that they can focus on what they do best: making fun games and delighting their players.
