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Immutable, a maker of blockchain games and a blockchain platform, has announced a game-changing development with its Immutable zkEVM blockchain, eliminating gas fees for gamers engaged in blockchain-based game transactions.
The company said this shift revolutionizes the player experience, ensuring a seamless and cost-free gaming environment.
As it stands today, gas fees — or commissions that users must pay to process their transactions — are among the biggest roadblocks for the mass adoption of decentralized gaming. Despite being an essential and integral part of any Web3 ecosystem used to incentivize miners or node operators to keep blockchains ensure, democratic, and decentralized, transaction fees can also be detrimental and strenuous for players, especially those coming from traditional gaming communities.
Immutable’s zkEVM, a dedicated gaming blockchain, is a technology designed to redefine the gaming landscape. By providing Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatibility, substantial scalability, and enterprise-grade security, the zkEVM ecosystem propels a big change within the Web3 gaming domain. This new technology eradicates the user experience barrier posed by gas fees, making it cost-effective for players to explore and engage with new games.
The gas fee in a blockchain transaction quantifies the computational effort needed to execute specific operations on the Ethereum network. As each Ethereum transaction demands computational resources to execute, users have to pay for these resources to safeguard Ethereum from spam attacks and hinder it from becoming entangled in never-ending computational loops.
Powered by Immutable’s zkEVM and the groundbreaking Immutable Passport, the gaming ecosystem is now able to abolish gas fees for users entirely. Game developers harnessing Immutable’s platform have the capability to sponsor these fees for Immutable Passport users, thereby eradicating this friction from the player’s journey, ultimately driving enhanced transaction conversion rates and creating a more welcoming environment for new gamers.
“There are a couple of norms in the blockchain space that mainstream players simply won’t adopt — gas fees fall into that category. To truly appeal to all gamers, web3 games must be able to offer players a familiar and streamlined user experience, making the blockchain components as effortless and native as possible,” said Alex Connolly, CTO at Immutable, in a statement. “Gas fees are one of the most prohibitive elements when integrating digital asset ownership into games, and Immutable is setting the new standard by removing them from the player experience altogether.”
Apart from adding unnecessary hurdles to the user experience, gas fees also necessitate players to always be mindful of having extra funds in the right wallet, often in the form of a blockchain’s native token to pay for transactions, Immutable said. For gamers, in particular, this means they usually have to jump through several hoops (bridging, swapping, on-ramping, etc.) to get the correct currency in the right place at the right time, the company said.
To overcome this issue once and for all, Immutable zkEVM — a gaming-focused chain that offers full compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, unlimited scalability, and enterprise-grade security — will enable game developers to eradicate the very concept of gas fees, making them not only invisible but essentially non-existent for players. This will make trying out new games significantly more affordable by removing the industry’s most challenging user experience barriers.
By leveraging Immutable zkEVM, game developers can sponsor gas fees for any Immutable Passport user, entirely abstracting away these commissions to enable frictionless onboarding and increased transaction conversion rates. When the Immutable zkEVM mainnet goes live early next year, Immutable plans to sponsor gas fees for all games in its ecosystem for a limited time to ensure a smooth transition.
Because of all the steps Immutable has taken to ensure Immutable zkEVM is gas efficient, the cost to game studios will be negligible — approximately $500-$1,000 for every 100,000 users, Immutable said. With proper game economy design, Immutable believes gas sponsorship will enhance player adoption, conversion, and overall revenue for game studios, far outweighing the cost of gas.
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