Do you know how to check the most popular Blockchain games in web3 right now? Here’s how

The gaming industry is going through a revolutionary age. Gamers can now play and earn real-world rewards and own in-game items with outside value. But figuring out which blockchain games are the most played is still tricky – but necessary. DappRadar tracks gaming dapps and their on-chain data, and you can find the most popular ones on the Top Games Ranking. But the metrics used in this area are not always what they seem. In this article, get to know the difference between DAU and UAW to find great games and save up time. Let’s dive in.

Top Games by on-chain transactions

DappRadar is a discovery platform that allows you to find some of the most popular gaming dapps in web3.

While we count the number of Unique Active Wallets in each dapp, this may not mean that these projects had the biggest number of users.

Active Users vs Unique Active Wallets

At DappRadar, people can have a data-driven understanding of the web3 world and some of the most popular decentralized applications (dapps).

Blockchain games are currently some of the dapps with the most registered transactions on their smart contracts. But it doesn’t mean that these are the most played games in Web3.

What are Unique Active Wallets?

Unique Active Wallets (UAW) is the metric DappRadar measures to express how many singular crypto wallet addresses interact with a dapp’s smart contracts. The precise transactions they do in the dapp change according to each dapp’s development. To register 1 Unique Active Wallet, this wallet must perform a transaction registered on the blockchain. This could mean, for example:

• A token swap: you exchange the in-game utility token for the game’s governance token.
• An NFT purchase: you buy an Avatar or skin on the game’s marketplace.
• A claim of daily rewards: You connect your wallet to earn rewards from playing or staking, etc.
• Listing a game item on a marketplace.
• Placing a bid on an item on a marketplace.

In some blockchain games, players don’t even need to connect their crypto wallets to play. So, although participating in the game’s ecosystem, their participation isn’t registered on the blockchain. Therefore the number of Unique Active Wallets isn’t always equal to the number of actual users.

What are Daily Active Users?

As the name suggests, the Daily Active Users (DAU) metric refers to the number of people who actively use an app – for example, the number of people who played a game – daily. It’s a metric that has grown in importance with the rise of the iOS AppStore and Google Play Store.

Not every blockchain game requires users to connect their wallet or make a transaction, and therefore the number of DAU must be differentiated from UAW.

• Unlike UAW, the DAU metric is not backed by blockchain – so it is not public for the world to see in a decentralized way.
• The number of Daily Active Users is usually announced by a game when it’s reached a milestone, and it’s often used as self-promotion.

So what should I look for if I want to know the most played blockchain games? While seeing the number of UAW connected to a gaming dapp is unquestionable data backed by blockchain, this doesn’t mean that each wallet represents a person or that people actually played the game.

However, the number of DAU is seldom off-limits for the general public and is not confirmed by blockchain technology – so you can never trust it blindly.

Different games, different ways to register activity

Knowing the most popular blockchain games requires a bit of critical thinking and an understanding of both DAU and UAW – especially on how each game counts a wallet.

Let’s see some examples to dig deeper into that.

Decentraland

Back in October 2022, DappRadar hit major headlines because our platform was showing that only a few UAW were interacting with Decentraland’s smart contracts. Now, while it did indicate that there were not many in-dapp NFT purchases, for example, this number did not represent the number of DAU. See below the total number of UAW interacting with Decentraland’s smart contracts in the last 30 days.

According to DappRadar, from Oct to Nov, around 1,770 unique active wallets interacted with Decentraland. But as DCL Metrics shows us, a dashboard built by the platform’s community, there were more people playing on the metaverse world in the same period.

While only 1,770 UAW completed 39.1k transactions with the dapp, the game affirms that the number of active users was almost double the number of unique users. Hinting that many players this month didn’t buy land or any in-game assets in the game’s marketplace.

Hunters On-Chain

A popular game worth looking into right now is Hunters On-Chain. The new dapp built on Polygon is the web3 version of the mobile game Hunt Royale that in little time managed to enter the Top 10 Games on Polygon Ranking on DappRadar.

Unlike Decentraland, for example, each new player needs to connect a crypto wallet to start playing – at the time of writing, on Polygon TestNet. This is done in a surprisingly seamless manner – a new wallet address is automatically created once you agree to join the game. Therefore, the number of UAW and Active Users can be looked at as being the same thing.

Moreover, players can play the mobile version of Hunters On-Chain, available for download on Google Play Store. So the downloads metric is a third-way web3 games usually use to show their user activity.

Keep up with the games with the highest UAW on DappRadar

The numbers shared by web3 projects about their own users are not necessarily on-chain data or unquestionable. On the other hand, you can always rely on the number of unique active wallets interacting with a game’s smart contracts shown on DappRadar.

Whether you’re a gamer or an investor, DappRadar is the best place to go to find out more about the web3 space – if you’re looking for trustworthy blockchain-backed data.