DApp DAUs are not DAUs
When it comes to games, it’s often argued on Twitter that the Ethereum blockchain (and probably all others) have scalability problems to reach mass audience:
It’s true that comparing the daily active users of a popular non fungible token game like Cryptokitties to a much wider phenomenon like Fortnite, the difference in daily active users is in magnitude of hundreds vs. millions.
A popular explanation among critics is the fact that a smart contract degrades it’s utility after few hundred daily transactions, when it becomes slow or fails to find space in blocks for new operations. So while Fortnite has 8 million users and counting, it appears crypto games struggle to reach just a few hundred.
As a game developer of both crypto and “regular” games I feel the need to point out a very simple mistake on many arguments in favor of this idea:
A Fortnite (or any other popular game) DAU is not the same as a DApp’s DAU.
While Fortnite users are counted by connections to a game server, DApp users are counted with smart contract transactions. The former, an “official” count by the game company, the latter, public information collected by sites like dappradar.
What the DApp radar fails to detect, is the amount of users reading the blockchain and actually using their tokens. For example, if my token is a virtual Lamborghini and I drive it every day I would get counted only the day of the purchase, as verifications cannot be recorded and extracted into metrics.
In our game Darkwinds players can get up to 50 random cards in one smart contract transaction, giving the players hundreds of deck combinations to compete against each other in our tournaments. They are only counted a few times in dapp trackers even if they play every day.
A fair comparison would be the daily distinct credit cards used to purchase game items in Fortnite. I guess this is still beyond current Ethereum limits, but perhaps not for much longer. The other way around would be if DApp developers publish their internal server metrics (and tell the truth)
Critics also miss the point on the entire concept of collectibles, where the game expands beyond the actual app:
In many ways the experience of the average CryptoKitties player is analogous to the experience tied to physical collectibles like baseball cards or postage stamps: a lot of time spent speaking and geeking with a passionate community, while the actual buying and selling is just one small part of a much larger experience.
It’s also worth to consider that in any free-to-play game like Fortnite only a fraction of daily active users make transactions, much less everyday, so when Epic reports 80 million users a vast majority has never bought any content. In the crypto gaming world, the same thing can be true if developers offer a ‘base’ experience and purchasing is optional.
For our Hammercoin game we use Bitcoin wallets encrypted locally to authenticate players to the servers, which can be done instantly and without a transaction, for free. And when the player decides to purchase or gets loot, Bitcoin fees apply, and it finally appears on the blockchain. Some users will never be counted and that’s fine.
In conclusion, if you make a crypto game where only some of the actions are published to the blockchain, there’s no scalability limits different to any other game: they only apply to the amount you can sell. And when the game requires players to purchase non fungible tokens, they need to be as fun and reusable as possible while they can’t be created at a faster pace.
That doesn’t sound bad at all!
