Developers can use smart contracts to create various decentralized applications, especially games.īlockchain 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. Ethereum, also known as the blockchain 2.0 platform, further adds supports for smart contracts, which are programs that can be stored and executed on the blockchain system. 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.īlockchain, emerged as the underlying supporting technology for Bitcoin, is a distributed ledger system providing non-tampering and traceability functionalities. 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. Since then, a few big players have gradually dominated the game, concentrating the game resources. 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. We construct a temporal kitty ownership transfer network and analyze the varying network parameters in the four stages. 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. First, we extracted the five million transaction records among 100 thousand addresses involved in CryptoKitties in the past three years. 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. The game gained explosive growth upon its release but quickly collapsed in a short time. Players could own, breed, and trade kitties, which are the only prop in the game. 2Web Mining Laboratory, Department of Media and Communication, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, ChinaĬryptoKitties was the first widely recognized blockchain game.
1School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, China.
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