An Overview of Gaming on Arbitrum

Arbitrum is still best known for its DeFi ecosystem. That isn’t shade; it simply reflects its first‐mover advantage.

The presence of key native primitives, early composability, extremely low gas fees, and a performant rollup stack put Arbitrum on every yield farmer’s dashboard. However, success in one vertical can limit your options. When most of your daily active users (DAUs) are traders, liquidity providers (often mercenaries in nature), and a few hundred DAO delegates, the addressable market tops out fast.

As a consequence, the ecosystem has spent the past eighteen months pushing into new territory, sometimes gracefully, and at other times with elbows out.

Gaming is the loudest of those pushes, and in 2025, it feels less like a side quest and more like a main-story arc.

There’s clearly a market; product-market fit is the harder part.

Blockchain gaming recorded 4.8 million daily unique active wallets (dUAW) in April 2025, its lowest figure of the year, but still accounted for 21% of all on-chain activity.

The dip hides real stickiness inside a handful of breakout titles:

• @TheLostGlitches (card-battler on Xai) logged 116,140 wallets and 2.1 million transactions in the last 30 days, roughly two transactions (tx) per wallet, per day. (@GAM3Sgg_)

• @TollanUniverse (roguelite, also on Xai) has a smaller 1,350 wallets; 1.96 million tx, but the tx-per-wallet ratio is absurdly high for such a tight cohort. (@DappRadar)

• @PirateNation (Proof of Play) now operates independently on its own Orbit chain, sustaining ≈~80 Mgas/s throughput while trimming infrastructure costs by around 70%. Tens of thousands of concurrent pirates now smoothly sail the digital seas. (@goldskyio)

Those numbers don’t mean that we’ve found the “Fortnite moment” of Web3, but they do indicate that real users are engaging in activities beyond claiming airdrops.

Nonetheless, Arbitrum presents several unique features that make it particularly attractive for building Web3 games.

1. Stylus quietly lowered the barrier for Developers

Most AAA studios and numerous indies build in C++ or Rust, rather than Solidity. Stylus, deployed in late 2024, allows developers to compile directly to a WASM VM on Arbitrum.

Offchain Labs CEO Steven Goldfeder spelled it out this July:

“Developers can write smart contracts in their preferred programming language using Arbitrum Stylus… one of the best things you can do to attract builders is give them tooling they already know.

This isn’t just a technical improvement; it helps remove the initial “no thanks” a gaming studio usually gives when you ask them to “learn Solidity” to launch a game on the blockchain, making ecosystems like Arbitrum more accessible to traditional game studios.

2. Chains for games, not just games on chains

The next structural piece of the puzzle is Arbitrum Orbit. Instead of competing with other apps for blockspace on Arbitrum One, studios can spin up bespoke L3s that inherit security but tweak fee tokens, throughput, and even consensus parameters based on their own requirements.

@ProofOfPlay’s trajectory is the clearest case study of the Orbit playbook in action. The studio went from Polygon to Arbitrum Nova and now runs two purpose-built Orbit L3s, Apex and Boss. That move slashed average transaction costs by more than 90% and unlocked horizontal scaling to ≈70 Mgas/s with 250 ms block times. In other words, the network now handles like a real-time game engine, not a spreadsheet.

On the content side, @XAI_GAMES is using Orbit to become a mini-platform: Lost Glitches is already live; Planet X, Riftstorm, MAYG, and Tollan Universe line up behind it. (GAM3S.GG, DappRadar) It reads less like 2022’s “launch a token on an L1 and pray” and more like Nintendo DS launch titles circling a new console.

3. Capital is following the roadmap at scale

In June 2024, the Arbitrum DAO allocated 200 million ARB to seed a dedicated Gaming Catalyst Program, the largest single allocation the DAO has ever made. The program has since been formalized as Arbitrum Gaming Ventures (AGV), a long-horizon fund tasked with transforming that token war chest into playable titles and the necessary infrastructure to support them.

Fast-forward to May 2025, and AGV has already deployed its first $10 million tranche across five projects: @PlayWildcard, XAI, Proof of Play, @Hyve_Labs, and @TREX_chain. The mix spans games, network tooling, and distribution tech, signaling that AGV is building an ecosystem, not just betting on one hit.

“Arbitrum Gaming Ventures is backing proven founders who aren’t just making games—they’re helping create an even more vibrant Arbitrum ecosystem,” partner @JohansonRick said in the launch release.

On 18 June 2025, Wildcard announced their $9 million follow-on round co-led by AGV and Paradigm, lifting the studio’s total funding to $55 million and demonstrating that the DAO’s capital can sit shoulder-to-shoulder with Tier-1 venture money, not just hand out grants.

Why does that matter? Because durable success in gaming comes from a pipeline, not a press release. Staged financing enables AGV to underwrite studios through prototyping, beta testing, and post-launch live operations, converting developer risk into long-term stickiness for the entire Arbitrum stack. If Wildcard, Lost Glitches, or the next title in line sticks the landing, the upside will be measured in cultural gravity as much as wallet counts and network usage. AGV will have proven that DAO capital can do more than pay for liquidity incentives; it can bankroll the next generation of games.

The friction that infra can’t solve

Infrastructure can hide friction, but it can’t make a bland game spicy. Gamers do not care about gas costs, block times, or proof systems. They care about dopamine loops and worlds worth losing sleep for. Most on-chain games still feel like spreadsheets wearing NFTs.

Stylus and Orbit strip away the “blockchain is hard” excuse. AGV strips away the “nobody funds real production” excuse.

What remains are the hard, boring truths of game design:

1. Retention > wallet counts. Lost Glitches’ two-tx-per-wallet stat is promising, but we need six-month retention cohorts, not weekly spikes.

2. Narrative quality matters. Pirate Nation’s lore and seasonal live-ops keep pirates logging back in; copy-paste token sinks won’t.

3. On-chain must be additive. If the chain is just a slow database, players will prefer Steam Cloud Saves.

That’s where vision matters, and Arbitrum has proven it has this with their recent partnership with Robinhood.

Where Arbitrum stands heading into H2 2025:

• Tooling: Multilanguage contracts are live, audited, and shipping.

• Architecture: App‐specific rollups exist in production, handling real volumes.

• Capital: The DAO is willing to co-lead rounds with venture capital, rather than just issuing “ecosystem grants.”

That’s a stronger hand than any EVM L2 had in the 2021 cycle.

But gaming is a marathon. You can’t brute-force cultural hits; you can only stack conditions so that when a genius designer shows up, they choose your chain by default.

The AGV-Wildcard deal hints at that flywheel: money + infra + press = mind-share > dev-share > player-share.

The Bottom Line

If the next breakout game doesn’t launch on Arbitrum, it won’t be due to a lack of tooling, block space, or funding.

It will be because fun is still harder to engineer than gas efficiency. Exactly how it should be.

For now, Arbitrum has stacked the odds in its favor.