The crypto-enabled game saw steady growth last month, reaching one million daily unique active wallets (DUAW) on multiple dates in October, according to a report from DappRadar published on Thursday.
In September, the blockchain game collectively collected over one million DUAW in three days. In October, the blockchain game saw more than one million DUAWs in four days, according to a chart from the crypto data firm, as the overall daily average appeared to slowly increase over the course of the month.
This is a modest increase overall from last month, but DappRadar’s report comes as some of the biggest games in crypto are trying to fight back against the increase in automated bots.
Such a large number of users linking their crypto wallets to blockchain games on a daily basis has happened before, such as in late 2021 and early 2022, when games like Splinterlands, Alien Worlds, and Axie Infinity hit the number one million DAU mark. Had moved forward from. According to DappRadar data, user numbers also reached the same high in April this year.
But over the past few years, games like Alien Worlds have been plagued with bot accounts — making it unclear how many of its users are actual humans.
Malicious actors can deploy bots in blockchain games to automate and increase their token rewards, without having to “grind” or actually play the game for hours. This has been a long-standing problem with blockchain games with real-world financial incentives – even Axie Infinity had to get involved with “bot farms” in 2021.
Last month, Alien Worlds’ official Twitter account reported that at least 1.6 million accounts using its game were bot accounts, which may have contributed to October’s inflated total. Alien Worlds did not immediately respond. decryptRequest for comment.
As DappRadar reports, in the past month, games like Alien Worlds, Sweat Economy, SecondLive, Splinterlands, and Battle Left Center Right (BLCR) recorded the highest number of daily unique active wallets.
While some of Alien Worlds’ roughly 133,000 daily DAUs may be accounts for bots, Sweat Economy co-founder Oleg Fomenko, whose game ranked second-highest with about 73,000 DAUs, pointed out decrypt It was reported via email in October that it was highly unlikely that there were many bots in the “move-to-earn” titles – or that users were otherwise cheating the game.
“Given that we have spent nine years working on movement verification, we are confident that the number of bots earning SWEAT is close to zero,” Fomenko explained. decrypt, referring to the game’s SWEAT token. “It’s not in a vacuum because there’s always someone trying to test new wig patterns or copy Monty Python’s ‘Ministry of Silly Walks’ sketch,” the co-founder shared.
“But we know they can never scale and our models are incredibly good at detecting whether walk/run data is real or not. We are constantly monitoring this kind of activity and we have seen everything from automated walking, to cradles, to shakes, to dogs, to metronomes, to fans and even dishwashers,” Fomenko continued.
In recent weeks, the casual pixelated MMORPG and pixel farming game also saw an increase in activity. In October, Pixels saw almost zero users, according to DappRadar data. But on October 30, the game moved to Axie Infinity’s Ethereum sidechain, Ronin, and nearly 6,000 UAWs were seen joining the game.
From November 6 to 10, Pixels saw nearly 50,000 unique active wallets connect to its platform, but that peak has since declined, according to DappRadar data.
But Axie Infinity co-founder Jeffrey “Jiho” Zierlin posted a chart late Wednesday claiming that the Pixel has indeed surpassed 100,000 daily active users.
Contacted for comment, Zierlin said decrypt An issue occurred with the game’s on-chain tracker. As a result, DappRadar’s chart may underrepresent actual player numbers. DappRadar has not responded yet decryptRequest for clarification.
As Pixel players and the game’s founder, Luke Barwikowski reports, whether botting or automated account creation is increasing the number of Pixel players, at least to some extent.
Barwikowski shared on Sunday that the Pixel team had “quietly caught” a group of bot accounts, and said on Monday that the team was already developing and implementing countermeasures to stop the spread of bot accounts.
Gaming research and consulting firm Sailor argued in a lengthy Alien Worlds blog post last year that unique wallet statistics in general are “prone to bots”, and that any UAW number “should be taken with a pinch of salt”. ” Instead, Navik analyst Karan Gaikward argued that transaction volume is a better metric for measuring authentic user activity.
The release of DappRadar’s report was accompanied by widespread discussion on social media about how valuable (or not) such figures are, and whether they paint a realistic picture of the demand seen for blockchain games.
While DappRadar found that gaming made up 33% of decentralized app (Dapp) activity last month, it’s almost impossible to determine how much of that activity was actual, individual human users — and how much was bots on the blockchain.
Edited by Andrew Hayward
Source: decrypt.co
