Biggest Steem Games - activity comparison [stats & analysis]

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(Edited)

Today we gonna look into players activity data of 3 biggest games on Steem blockchain: Splinterlands, Next Colony and Drug Wars*

  • Drug Wars technically is no longer on the Steem blockchain, however many Steemians still play this game, and the app itself broadcast some data (only timestamps) so its usage is trackable by my tools.
  • If you don't wanna dig in this nice little stats, go to Figure 4 which is most important.

Player base


Figure 1

These numbers are not very important though. What we need to know is how many players still play. At the end, we will calculate some important ratios (analysis section). Also, remember that some games started earlier. Splinterlands is the longest operating game and Next Colony shortest. What is more, this data can slightly differ from real data.

Average daily players last month


Figure 2

Ok, another disclaimer: one day I realized that Drug Wars sent a transaction with my account although I didn't play for a long time. After research, I've found it happened after dapp "leaving" Steem. Recently I didn't see this type of faked data so activity should be real.

Inactive Players


Figure 3

Criteria: "Inactive" player is the player who hasn't transacted for more than 14 days. As you can see, some valuable data is emerging now from the stats.

Analysis

Now the cherry on top. For example, it seems Drug Wars has many, many players but.. also many inactive.

Active Ratiovs. Player Basevs. Inactive
Splinterlands22,52%39,02%
Next Colony37,30%76,77%
Drug Wars19,33%25,92%

Which game has the best player retention? It seems Next Colony is the winner.. but there is always some butt (sometimes big).

Crucial thing is that Steem games are easy to play by a bot (except non-Steem DW). Have in mind too, that Splinterlands started to operate during very hard times for Steem and got many players back then.

But hey, maybe taking arbitrary 2 weeks as inactive criteria is not right? Different games have different dynamics. Let's take Player Base and subtract Inactive Players:


Figure 4

This chart shows also less active players, without hard caps. Now we can see some nice data and in my opinion, this chart is real activity and is the most important info.

And then calculate ratio:

Active Daily Ratiovs. Active (soft)
Splinterlands53,22%
Next Colony72,56%
Drug Wars76,05%

This info shows which players from Active (soft) are more active on a daily basis. The lower number doesn't mean it is bad because it shows the characteristic of the gameplay. This means that Splinterlands users do not need to log in every day, but NC and DW users need to because they may be under attack any moment and need to develop economy!

Trends

To have a full image of the situation you may want to look at the trends.


Figure 5

Showing only timespan when all 3 games were available to play: from 21.04.2019 to 17.07.2019. DW finally got less active players than Splinterlands which leads the race now.

The DW spike is the faked volume I mentioned before (beware to whom you give your Steem keys..).

Data source (own) and more interesting data to find:

Splinterlands Stats

Next Colony Stats

Drug Wars Stats

Thanks for your attention and please leave the comment .



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6 comments
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Thanks for the great overview, @rafalski! I like the focus. Active players are the most important criterion for me. Your tool is part of my daily workflow and I can't imagine to live without it. Thanks!

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(Edited)

SM and DW show that there is some room for NC , you can try to double number of the active users.

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might want to add in the factor that both splinterlands and drugwars heavily inventivizes running multiple accounts for daily rewards... Splinterlands does have an entry barrier with requiring the purchase of starter-packs, but in the early days the promo-codes for those were easy to get for free, too.

Drugwars doesn't really pay anything anymore and the game is rather boring... so naturally all the farm-bots and some active players loose interest.

Running multiple accounts in nextcolony does of course also bring its benefits, but it's not really useful as a "passive" token-farm... that's actually what i appreciate about that app a lot!

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Well, I'm trying to construct an idea in my head how to detect bots, maybe some day.

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Thanks a lot for this analysis.
Being untraceable on the steem blockchain does not mean necessarily not using it at each instant and for each transactions ;)
We made a choose between giving fun to real players, or to few people who are using bots or the blockchain itself to track others. It may be not important depending of the game, but for DW it is a must have to make the game more fair for everyone.

We also offer social logins with facebook, google and vk. and those numbers are not taken into count in your graphics, but whatever we are proud to give life to the gaming on Steem beside SM and NC.

Again thanks for your time.

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add top DEC earner and card burner list. currently we can't get those list. thanks for give us a valuable site .

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