How CryptoKitties’ 500 DAUs could be comparable to a 1 million DAU mobile F2P game

Rethinking the value of numbers

When it comes to free-to-play mobile games, there are clear metrics for measuring success.

The number of players and the frequency of engagement are given in the form of Daily and Monthly Active User (DAUs and MAUs).

And breaking down overall revenue figures, developers and investors discuss a game’s Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) or Average Revenue Per Paying User (ARPPU) to compare titles and decide whether it’s worth spending more marketing money.

When it comes to blockchain games, however, the situation is much more complex.

Although the likes of DappRadar and State of the Dapps provide what looks like reasonable data on distributed apps running on Ethereum, individually and collectively, these don’t provide the full picture.

Partly this is because these open source data sources work by looking at the activity through each game’s Ethereum wallet addresses. This can be accumulate to provide transactional value and volume total that can be converted into daily, weekly, monthly etc metrics.

The DAUs total for blockchain games are also generated in terms of unique wallet addresses (typically MetaMask) interacting with the game, although this likely assumes each wallet is a unique player.

Of course, sampling errors and timing issues also generate noise over longer time durations.

This is why while DappRadar gives CryptoKitties 362 daily active players and State of the Dapps gives it 363, when it comes to 7 days volume and transactions, DappRadar has totals of 219 ETH and 26,714 transactions, but State of the Dapps 244 ETH and 27,706 transactions, a difference of 11 and 4% respectively.

Players or payers?

And, anyway, compared to a free-to-play mobile game, which is designed to optimize player retention and a very high level of daily engagement, measuring the transactional activity of a blockchain game is a very different metric.

Similarly, the vast majority of F2P mobile game players never spend any money. Typical conversion rates are 1%. In this way, if a mobile game had one million DAUs, it would only have 10,000 daily payers, which is what we’d be measuring if it was a blockchain game.

That’s a better comparison in terms of scale with the 500 or so players who daily spend Ether in CryptoKitties (it’s 1:20 versus 1:2000) but it’s still not ideal.

F2P mobile games are designed to encourage daily engagement and then to turn that engagement into monetization. In contrast, games like CryptoKitties are purely transactional. You can’t do anything apart from look at your kitties without spending Ether.

As its developer Axiom Zen points out, a better comparison — at least in terms of a more meaningful DAU total — would be the daily total of all the players who log into game through its centralized server. But in this situation, there’s not much point in logging to CryptoKitties unless you want to make a transaction so even here we find the comparison between payers and players, between blockchain games and F2P mobile games breaks down.

The same terms are being used, but the context is orthangonal.

In this way, then, the only sensible use of such metrics for blockchain games is as a comparison with other blockchain games. And in that case everyone is agreed CryptoKitties remains king.