Onchain Gaming Cost Comparison: Dedicated Rollup vs. Shared Blockspace on L1
We break down how onchain games can save over 90% in onchain expenses by running their own rollup, using real data from real games.
Blockchain gaming is entering a critical phase as developers navigate the balance between decentralization, player experience, and web3 economics. Onchain games offer unmatched transparency and player ownership, but these advantages come with significant costs – processing gameplay onchain and storing the associated data isn’t cheap.
However, the blockchain setup developers choose for their game can drastically lower those costs.
In this blog, we’ll use data from real games to compare onchain costs under three different frameworks: A game running as a protocol on a gaming-specific L2, a game running on its own L2 rollup, and a game running on its own L3 rollup. The data will illustrate the enormous cost savings that are possible for game developers under the rollup model – even if the game is only partially onchain.
Analyzing Pixels: How much could this popular game save by moving from Ronin Chain to a dedicated L2 or L3?
We’ll start by looking at a real, popular game running on a shared blockchain: Pixels. Pixels runs on Ronin Chain, an Ethereum sidechain dedicated to gaming, and boasts up to 2.5 million active addresses in peak months.
Source: Token Terminal
Pixels’ gameplay focuses on farming and exploration, and players can mint items they own as NFTs and then trade or sell them. Pixels also supports purchasing of items, upgrades, and more with its native $PIXEL currency. Overall, Pixels’ onchain footprint is relatively simple – the game supports onchain asset ownership and trading in a way that enhances player experience, but core gameplay mechanics and logic are handled offchain. We would characterize Pixels as a partially onchain game, as opposed to a fully onchain game like Pirate Nation (which we’ll cover more later).
Source: Token Terminal
According to Token Terminal, the game and its users paid $7,512 in gas fees for all Pixels gameplay-related transactions during the month-long period of 2/27/25 to 3/26/25, based on an analysis of all Pixels’ smart contracts (on both Ronin Chain and Ethereum). Those transactions generated 763.9 MB worth of Pixels gameplay data that was committed to the Ronin Chain.
From those numbers, we can calculate it costs $9.83 per 1 MB of data processed to run Pixels on the Ronin Chain. What could those costs be if Pixels ran its own rollup?
In order to find out, we’ll analyze rollups’ data availability (DA) costs per MB of data settled. While DA and gas fees aren’t the same thing, they’re analogous business costs when comparing a rollup to a protocol on a shared chain. Rollups capture gas fees charged to users on the chain as revenue, so they aren’t appropriate to compare here. DA, however, is what rollups pay to post their data to the underlying blockchain and thereby tap into its security guarantees. That, along with the fact that DA is the biggest onchain cost of running a rollup, makes it the best metric to compare rollup expenses to expenses for a protocol on a shared blockchain.
With that in mind, let’s look at what Pixel’s onchain costs could be under two of the most cost-efficient rollup setups we’ve seen builders deploy: L2 rollups with Celestia SuperBlobs and Arbitrum L3s with Arbitrum AnyTrust.
Our previous research has found that on average, rollups with SuperBlobs pay $0.81 per MB of data settled for DA. So, Pixel’s 763.9 MB of data would cost $619 over the same time period – a 92% savings.
Research in our State of Rollups report showed that L3s can be even cheaper for DA than L2s. Specifically, we found that L3s using Arbitrum AnyTrust are the cheapest to run, at an average of $0.04 per MB of data settled. Based on those numbers, running Pixels as an Arbitrum L3 would cost just $31 – a 99.6% savings that would make onchain costs virtually non-existent.
As a rollup, Pixels would have control over gas fees, so they could pass some or all of those savings on to users, either by paying gas on their behalf or even increasing rewards. Pixels would have the freedom to set gas fees at whatever level they want, and could then keep those gas fees as revenue rather than pay them out to the underlying blockchain.
What about a fully onchain game?
The more data your game processes onchain, the larger the potential savings of running the game as a rollup and the more important those savings are to the game’s overall economics. Pirate Nation by Proof of Play is a perfect example. While Pixels is partially onchain, Pirate Nation is fully onchain, meaning all gameplay and player activity is processed on the blockchain. In fact, Pirate Nation is so data-intensive that it doesn’t just run the game on a single chain – it uses two rollups working in sync to better spread out the load.
From 2/27/25 to 3/26/25, Pirate Nation processed 9,338.9 MB of data onchain, versus the 763.9 MB Pixels processed during the same time period. But during that time, Pirate Nation paid a total of 0.024 ETH in DA costs across both its chains, equivalent to $45.13 – much less than the $7,512 Pixels paid. [1]
The numbers further illustrate what an economic unlock rollups are for onchain games. Pirate Nation pays less than 1% of what Pixels pays to process 12x as much data, all because it’s deployed as a standalone rollup rather than as a protocol on a shared blockchain. The savings and increase in data that rollups can process efficiently fundamentally change the economics of an onchain game, and gives devs more options on everything from design to user acqusition tactics.
Rollups change what’s possible for onchain games
The economic impact of deploying onchain games on dedicated rollups versus shared blockchains is huge. As our analysis shows, transitioning a partially onchain game like Pixels from Ronin Chain to a dedicated rollup can nearly wipe out onchain costs and enable the game to process significantly more data efficiently. That does more than improve profit margins – it unlocks new possiblities for game design and player incentives.
As blockchain gaming matures, dedicated rollups will likely become essential infrastructure, allowing developers not only to scale sustainably but also to pass cost savings directly to players.
If you’d like to learn how Conduit can help you roll out your own gaming rollup, schedule a demo of our platform here.
End notes:
[1] Pirate Nation’s DA costs work out to roughly $0.004 per MB of data settled. Pirate Nation rollups are Arbitrum L3s using AnyTrust for DA. So, why does Pirate Nation pay so much less per MB than the $0.04 average we shared earlier? The main reason is that the average includes several rollups that frequently submit incomplete blobs of transaction data to the L1, meaning their blobs contain lots of empty, unused space and they aren’t getting maximum efficiency. The reason for this is that those rollups typically need to finalize those transactions quickly due to their use case, despite the loss of efficiency. Pirate Nation, however, processes enough data that it is able to use its blobspace more efficiently.