> My company could just represent the skins as ERC721 tokens and instantly have access to the wealth of infrastructure that already supports the ERC721 standard. People can buy and sell on a marketplace of their choosing (Opensea, Blur, etc.), they can manage their assets using a wallet of their choice (Metamask, Rainbow, Frame, Coinbase Wallet, etc.).
But doing all the work to integrate ERC721 into your game might take the same time (or more) than a simple centralized payment system (not to mention that transacting these ERCshits is costly, more than 5USD per trade most of the time). So why bother?
Most L2 developer experience is pretty easy nowadays. I would say a lot easier than Apple app development & distribution experience, for example. L2 fees are a fraction of the cost of industry standard payment processors.
The DX can continue to get better, but that’s not what is holding game devs back from choosing an L2.
What L2 are you talking about? If lightning, I agree. But that doesn't support NFTs.
If another, which one? Take in account that L2s are based on a network of channels. You can only transfer value atomically among a network of channels if the tokens being transferred across the channels are fungible, otherwise what you transfer from Alice to Bob is not the same than what you transfer from Bob to Carol.
Most Ethereum L2s (rollups) follow similar patterns; once you learn how to build on one with tools like Hardhat + Alchemy/Infura + Solidity, you can easily transfer these skills to other L2s. zkSync, Scroll, Optimism, Arbitrum. Most of these aim to be EVM compatible, so NFTs and other contracts can be built on them.
But doing all the work to integrate ERC721 into your game might take the same time (or more) than a simple centralized payment system (not to mention that transacting these ERCshits is costly, more than 5USD per trade most of the time). So why bother?