An Introduction to Blockchain Gaming Infrastructure: How You Can Use It Today

This Naavik deep dive, produced in partnership with Forte and written by Maxime Eyraud, is the second essay in a series on building blockchain games. It compares Web2 gaming infrastructure (engines, cloud back-ends, app stores, marketplaces) with blockchain gaming infrastructure, examining trade-offs such as lock-in, censorship, centralization and interoperability. It then surveys blockchain-specific building blocks, including Layer 1 and Layer 2 chains, creative tools, wallets, marketplaces, in-game economics, payments, and end-to-end platforms such as Forte and Ultra. The article notes that Sky Mavis's Ronin Bridge lost over $500M in ETH and USDC to a single individual, and that Ramp reduced the Axie Infinity on-ramp to 19 steps and 12 minutes, down from nearly 60 steps and an average onboarding time of 2 hours. It closes with decision prompts for developers and hypothetical stack examples for an AAA PC RPG and a mobile card collecting game.