How to Define GameFi Users - Footprint Analytics

Daniel, Jan 2023

In GameFi, it’s not so simple to know how many people are actually playing a game. While most platforms use UAW (unique wallet addresses) as the main metric for GameFi projects, in reality, this indicator falls short in telling us how active, popular or sustainable a blockchain game is.

In regular gaming, we define a player as somebody who starts the console or logs in and starts playing. While there are different types of players — first-timers, regular players, casual gamers, hardcore fans — defining players is straightforward. There is only one way to interact with the game, i.e., by playing it.

Defining GameFi users presents another set of challenges. In fact, it is not even obvious what to call people who connect their wallets to these protocols.

Are they indeed GameFi “users” who primarily use the protocol for another end, much like DeFi users? Are they players, or does that imply too much analogism with off-chain gaming?

To start, there are two main types of participants in GameFi. First, there are real gamers who play for enjoyment. Second are investors who see the game as a way to make money. Additionally, there are bots.

While some investors play the game, others farm out the manual work to “scholars” as part of GameFi guilds. Some who own project assets never personally try the game. For example, those who buy land in The Sandbox because they think it will increase in value or buy AXS tokens for a similar reason. Indeed, one of the highest-priced GameFi tokens is for a title that has yet to be released, Illuvium.

Clearly, 1 Unique Wallet Address ≠ 1 Player.

So, how can blockchain analysts define GameFi users? In this article, we’ll use Era7: Game of Truth as an example for most of these metrics.

Simple Metrics to Understand Types of GameFi Users

GameFi metrics can be simple or complex.

The simplest metrics tell us the number of interactions, interactors, holders, and users. While they don’t tell us qualitative information about the person on the other side of the screen, they are a logical place to start.

The number of unique users who interact with the contract

First, the analysts can filter all but basic transactions, like approve and transfer, to get a baseline for interacting users.

Analysts can quantify this metric with several indicators, such as total and active users.

Source: Walken Users Table (Duplicate)

The type of account/business

Several methods allow us to determine whether active gamers or speculators dominate a game. User interval dispersion can show us the distribution of positions. If the positions skew to extremely large, it is unnatural — the more users with median positions, the better.

Source: Address Holding NFT’s & Holdding ERA Token (temp)

NFT holding users

We can see the quantity of NFTs being traded and the price.

Token holders & token price

Like NFTs, analysts can see the price fluctuations of in-game tokens.

Summary:

When most people go to a website like Coinmarketcap or DappRadar, they look at the above metrics and call it a day. However, the more experienced GameFi analyst understands that these metrics are superficial and hardly paint a holistic picture of what is happening.

Are these users injecting value into the protocol or constantly trying to extract it? How many of the users are active, how many are inactive, and how many are bots? Is the project engaging enough to convince players to purchase NFTs? If not, where is the friction in the pipeline?

We can start answering these questions by examining game operation indicators.

Advanced Game Operation Analysis Indicators

Engagement

Using Footprint Analytics, analysts can see the number of transactions per wallet per day. Furthermore, they can see the type of contract interaction. These include:

Mints
Transfers
Withdrawals
Deposits

Source: Era7 Game Daily Transactions & Per Users

Gameplay activities

Not all gameplay is equal. For example, a player merely experimenting with a project is less valuable than one who actively invests in in-game assets to create a more enjoyable gameplay experience. Furthermore, a purely business investor, e.g., a gaming guild, will have a constant deflationary effect on price because, like a bitcoin miner, they will constantly have to sell tokens and assets to support their business.

There are several charts that analysts can use to assess in-game user activities, like:

Value of engagement (value injection vs. value extraction)
Daily money inflow into game smart contracts/transactions
Daily money withdrawn from game smart contracts/transactions

Specific player NFT stratification

NFTs play a central role within GameFi. People tend to overanalyze token price as a metric of a game compared to its NFTs, perhaps because the price of a token is more straightforward than an NFT. To understand NFT prices within an ecosystem, one has to understand the ecosystem itself and what the different classes, rarities, and properties of an NFT do.

At the most basic level, you have the number of users who hold NFTs. However, we can get more granular. For example:

Number of NFTs held per capita
Number of holders per NFT tier
NFT holder vs. those who interact with the contract, accounting for NFT upgrade funnel. (Some games require constant upgrades to play.)

Source: NFT Project History Address & Lost Address (temp)

User loyalty & retention

One enormous advantage of the blockchain is that it allows anyone to look into protocol activity in a previously impossible way. In regular gaming, there is no way for an outsider to see the retention rate of players or the amount of average activity per user. However, all these things are available to the GameFi analyst.

Lost users
Lost users who hold NFTs
The retention rate of newly added NFT-holding users in the
New user growth rate vs. old user loss rate

Amount of bot traffic

While Footprint Analytics has several filters for gauging NFT wash trading [link], creating clear-cut methods to detect bots within GameFi protocols is still a work in progress. But analysts can filter out wallet addresses that only present interaction with little or no value injection.

Summary

As GameFi expands, there will be a plethora of low-quality projects for every success and a certain number of bots and dead addresses linked to protocols for every active player.

It’s up to the GameFi analyst to define the different kinds of users depending on the project they’re tracking. That means using basic and advanced indicators to differentiate the different types of users to assess a title’s health, quality, and growth potential.

This piece is contributed by Footprint Analytics community.

The Footprint Community is a place where data and crypto enthusiasts worldwide help each other understand and gain insights about Web3, the metaverse, DeFi, GameFi, or any other area of the fledgling world of blockchain. Here you’ll find active, diverse voices supporting each other and driving the community forward.

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