Abstract
CryptoKitties was the first widely recognized blockchain game. Players could own, breed, and trade kitties, which are the only prop in the game. The game gained explosive growth upon its release but quickly collapsed in a short time. This study analyzes its entire player activity history for the first time in literature and tries to find the reasons for the rise and fall of this first blockchain game mania. First, we extracted the five million transaction records among 100 thousand addresses involved in CryptoKitties in the past three years. Based on the numbers of addresses involved in the game each day, we divide the game progress into four stages: the primer, the rise, the fall, and the serenity. We construct a temporal kitty ownership transfer network and analyze the varying network parameters in the four stages. We find that a large number of players poured in during the 10th and 18th days since the game release and quickly exited in the following month. Since then, a few big players have gradually dominated the game, concentrating the game resources. Through further analysis, we find that the main reason for the rapid increase in the game popularity was the increase of public attention by media outlets, while the reasons for the rapid decline in the game popularity include the oversupply of kitties, the decreasing of player income, a widening gap between the rich and poor players, and the limitations of blockchain systems. Based on these observations, we advise on the further blockchain game design: (1) to finely control the production of props and avoid an oversupply, (2) to balance the gaming cost and revenue and protect the enjoyment of players, (3) to narrow down the gap between rich and poor and create an equal gaming community, (4) to consider the limitations of blockchain systems in their game designs.
Highlights
Blockchain, emerged as the underlying supporting technology for Bitcoin [1], is a distributed ledger system providing non-tampering and traceability functionalities
We construct the kitty ownership transfer network G (V, E), where V is the set of addresses belong to kitty owners, including the game publisher and players, who have the actual ownership of kitties, and E is the set of directed edges representing the actual ownership changes
Note that the average degree, Gini coefficients, and reciprocity suddenly increased in June 2019. We found that they were caused by the launch of Wrapped Cryptokitties (WCK), which is an ERC-20 token contract, enabling players to exchange unwanted
Summary
Blockchain, emerged as the underlying supporting technology for Bitcoin [1], is a distributed ledger system providing non-tampering and traceability functionalities. Blockchain games are considered to have unique advantages over traditional online games in that their gaming data and logic are transparently stored and executed on blockchains [4] These advantages suit games with in-game payment and chance mechanisms, e.g., gambling, CryptoKitties Transaction Network Analysis which often suffered from trust issues in traditional online environment. The attributes and transactions of kitties are recorded in the Ethereum blockchain. We first construct a kitty ownership transfer network and investigate the network structural changes over time. We conjecture and verify the possible reasons for the rapid changes in gaming popularity from four perspectives: the supply and demand of kitties, the profitability in the game, the inequality of players’ wealth, and the limitations of blockchain systems.
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