Why The Next Generation of Games Will Be Built on Eclipse

Gaming Lead Faris Oweis explains how Eclipse will help Web3 gaming kick into high gear in 2023 and beyond.

Eclipse Gaming Lead, Faris Oweis, sat down for a Q&A about the future of gaming and how Eclipse compares to other interoperability and Layer 2 solutions for game developers. In this article, he describes how Eclipse enables gaming dApps to break free from the traditional constraints of Layer1 chains, with a customizable solution designed to offer dApps the flexibility that they need to respond to changing customer needs. 

‍Eclipse – The Concept and the Value:

‍Faris Oweis, Eclipse Gaming Lead: We're getting to the point as an industry where we need to make a push for consumers. To do that, we need underlying infrastructure that is customized to what that audience demands. If you’re locked into an L1, you're bound by its design constraints. In the Eclipse model, you can harness many of the tools that L1s offer, while benefiting from an adjustable structure. Things change, your community changes, what you build changes, and your ideas change. You should have the level of flexibility and adaptability to switch at any given time and choose what works best for you. 

I think that’s a very powerful capability in a world that should be interoperable, multi-chain, but should also be community driven. By utilizing some of the functionality and infrastructure that Eclipse provides, you can have both a consumer mindset and a community ethos.

When a dApp comes to Eclipse, they're entrusting us with two things: 

1. They're trusting the virtual machine and the corresponding connection to the L1s 
2. Trusting that we can glue together and package a lot of different parts that they would otherwise have to piecemeal together themselves. 

“Build your dApp the way you need to build it”

Traditional L2s take the execution out, and leave everything else to the L1, which gets you to a certain point in terms of throughput and TPS. Eclipse is not a traditional L2. Say the dApp is a game – Eclipse is coming in on the settlement level, but we're saying "hey, you should grab your data availability and security from whatever L1 suits your needs." Maybe today, Avalanche is best, or Polygon is best, but three months from now when you have multiple game titles, and over a million users, that might change. We're just saying that you should build your dApp the way you need to build it, and then adjust later if you need to.

Eclipse provides the most flexible, adaptable version of a modular future, and we don’t assume that we know how things will ultimately play out. Whether it be L1s or L2s, people take different approaches to how they see success potentially being achieved, and personally, I’m a fan of driving towards a specific vertical, versus "if we build it, they will come." Take gaming as an example – developers need curated, specific functionality and their requirements can’t be addressed in a generic way. I’m a big fan of Eclipse’s intentionality when it comes to specific verticals, and then customizing in ways that respond to the actual needs of those communities.

In the short term, Eclipse is focused on making public blockchain infrastructure more efficient and effective in meeting the primary needs of users, by improving things like dedicated throughput, commercialization, speed, security, customization, and interoperability. This will enable users to execute their current needs better and in a way that suits them. Users, especially game developers, can take advantage of Eclipse's customizable features to create their own rollup that meets their specific requirements. 

The long-term goal is to focus on ideation and innovation to unlock game-changing experiences that were previously impossible or inconvenient. People get bored of "basic" really quickly, and Eclipse wants to help developers do rad stuff, and develop solutions that offer unique and exciting experiences that will attract and retain users. We can make suggestions about which of the different ecosystems to go with, but ultimately, it's up to our customers to decide which blockchain to use, and they shouldn’t feel rushed. 

“With Eclipse, if the community needs to move to another L1, they can do that”

If a community feels strongly about an L1 being the best L1 for a particular game, that game will stay with that ecosystem, because why would they switch? And you’ll have some tribal loyalty in every community, just like some people use Uber, and some people use Lyft. But with Eclipse, if the community needs to move to another L1, they can do that. They can also be in different ecosystems by virtue of being Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible. As long as the protocol is EVM compatible, it's not preventing you from welcoming a community from somewhere else, it just simply means that where you're grabbing your security and your data availability from can change if you want to.

Eclipse and Web3 Gaming:

‍Right now, people are looking at gaming as a use-case that's going to onboard all these new users to Web3, but just like in the traditional gaming space, a relatively small number of games will be developed that will attract the vast majority of users. It’s like music – just like one hit song can make a record label, one hit game can make a studio.

The goal is that by using Eclipse, game developers will be able to express their creativity in ways that they currently can’t. We’re quite literally unlocking new aspects of game design, new ideas, new capabilities, and new features. We’re giving people a chance to take a shot at something that hasn't been done in a Web3 native way before. Eclipse is technical architecture, but our hope is that based on what we provide, new ideas will come into existence.

Once you can do things with Web3 that a traditional gaming model can't, that’ll be the big differentiator. I don't think we've reached that point yet, but we’re getting there. Right now there are a lot of Web3 gaming experiences that are centered on classic concepts of ownership and peer-to-peer trading. That’s a good start, but I think that just like any innovation cycle, we’ll see it evolve over time as the supporting infrastructure and the user experience tools evolve. That spurs innovation, which then unlocks new experiences. I see Web3 games as an opportunity to bring back the kind of raw creativity we used to see in movies, before streaming screwed up the economics.

“At Eclipse, we're literally trying to birth new ideas, on-chain”

I really like the idea of a fully on-chain game where the gameplay is completely controlled by players. You create open-source code, so that gamers can literally dictate the direction of the game. If you design the game in that way, you also create game persistence, which means that the game can take on a life of its own, totally beyond the control or even lifespan of the original developer or game studio. Maybe in 100 years people are still playing it, but by that stage it might be a million miles away from the original developers’ vision. It’s so community-driven that it's unstoppable. That’s a totally Web3 native, degen approach.

I also think that the ability to ensure privacy within games is very compelling, and an ability to support on-chain micropayments is critical, because once you have high enough throughput, and you're able to find cheap blocks, it becomes economically feasible to create a circular economy where you pay players for the value they produce in ways that are sustainable for the game developers. That isn't achievable with the infrastructure that's been brought to market so far. As a gamer, I think that if you can participate from a creative standpoint, but also be remunerated, that’s a pretty powerful combination.

From a game developer’s point of view, there are two main aspects to Eclipse’s usefulness. They have some immediate needs, like how do I reduce gas fees? How do I increase throughput? And then they have the big ideas, their big vision. They can’t achieve those loftier goals until their primary needs are taken care of.

We typically find people coming to Eclipse have the big ideas already, they just want to test them out, discover what's possible and go beyond to explore new ideas and discover new use-cases. We have people testing out micropayments, and zero knowledge batch actions for Dutch auction executions, all types of cool stuff. That's really what we're trying to get to at Eclipse – we're literally trying to birth new ideas on-chain.

“I believe in network effects and when people tap into their ingenuity, it's contagious”

We just need a beachhead, that one game that really "wows" people, and delivers all the benefits of Web3, like ownership, but is really fun to play. It hasn't happened yet, but it will. Ideally, I would say it should be a melee-style game, because they’re geared towards a lot of participants. Melee games are among the most expensive games to build, so it's a high-risk, high-reward, high-CapEx endeavor, but it also potentially attracts the most players, from all over the world. That kind of game brings communities and ecosystems together more effectively than, say, an individual third-person shooter.

I think we’re seeing a renewed bullishness towards Web3 gaming in general. Through the modular movement, we are seeing a surge in ingenuity. I believe in network effects and when people tap into their ingenuity, it's contagious. Communities are picking up on this, and I’m sensing a resurgence of enthusiasm about what's possible.

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About Eclipse:

Eclipse is a customizable rollup provider allowing developers to “pick and choose” the best aspects of blockchain technology needed to create unique decentralized applications, without making technical trade-offs. 

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