Brave Frontier Heroes launched on the Ethereum blockchain on 30 January 2020.
The reason for the excitement around the game concerned how it combined the gameplay style of #1 Ethereum blockchain game My Crypto Heroes. Which is predominantly played by Japanese users, with the characters and IP of highly popular Japanese mobile RPG BRAVE Frontier.
Indeed, both games use the same backend MCH+ platform. Operated by Japanese studio Double Jump.Tokyo which developed My Crypto Heroes, and works with fellow Japanese developer Alim Co, for Brave Frontier Heroes.
It’s a combination that proved remarkably popular.
To-date Brave Frontier Heroes has attracted between 1,200 to 1,400 daily active unique wallets. Making it the second most popular game on Ethereum, behind My Crypto Heroes.
These wallets also spent an impressive 2,850 ETH (around $630,000) on in-game NFT characters during the first week.
Given this performance, DappRadar decided to dig deeper into the data. We investigated the daily retention and crossover of its audience with My Crypto Heroes.
Key Takeaways
- Launched on 30 January attracting between 1,200 to 1,400 daily active unique wallets. Immediately becoming the #2 game on Ethereum in terms of daily active unique wallets.
- These wallets spent an impressive 2,850 ETH (around $630,000) on in-game NFT characters during the first week.
- Over a third of its audience also played #1 Ethereum blockchain game My Crypto Heroes.
- This demonstrates how close cooperation between developers can drive a successful product launch.
- There was no evidence that the launch of Brave Frontier Heroes cannibalized My Crypto Heroes’ audience.
Daily Retention
Brave Frontier Heroes launched with 1,243 unique wallets interacting with its smart contract on launch day.
We followed this cohort during February 2020 to track their ongoing daily retention rate.
For example, on 31 January (day 1), 1,048 of those 1,243 wallets returned, giving a retention rate of 84%. By the end of the period tracked (day 27). 54% of the day 1 wallets were still interacting with the game.
We then compared this rate with My Crypto Heroes. Similarly taking the 3,425 unique wallets that interacted with its smart contracts on 30 January as its starting point.
As can clearly be seen, the trend for both games is broadly similar. In particular, both games experienced a sharp drop in retention rate during the period day 5 to day 10 but then recovered from day 11 onwards.
It’s not clear what caused this temporary decline. The Ethereum gas price was increasing during this period but it wasn’t particularly high. However, other games using the Ethereum blockchain also experienced a similar dip in activity. So it’s safe to conclude this was a systemic issue not something particular to these two games.
It’s also worth noting that as a mature game, which grew steadily in 2019, it’s not a great surprise that My Crypto Heroes has a higher daily retention rate than Brave Frontier Heroes.
The Result
It ended the period with a retention rate of 79% compared to 54% for Brave Frontier Heroes. Both these retention rates are broadly similar to those seen in other blockchain games running on Ethereum.
Obviously Brave Frontier Heroes has just launched and hence hadn’t yet built up the same committed player base. No doubt, some players during this period were attracted by the headlines being generated around the launch and checking out whether it was an experience they enjoyed.
Audience Crossover
The other metric we considered was player crossover, or more specifically put, the percent of the daily active unique wallets playing Brave Frontier Heroes who were also playing My Crypto Heroes.
Obviously, because of the close cooperation, cross-marketing, NFT interoperability and similar cultural and geographic appeal between the two projects, this was expected to be high.
As the graph shows, the absolute number of active wallets that were playing Brave Frontier Heroes and My Crypto Heroes was steady during this period, roughly around the 500 mark.
In percent terms, the peak was 49% on day 0, dropping to 37% by day 27.
Conclusions
Building a community for a new blockchain game takes a lot of time and resources. In that context, working with the community of an already successful game is a good strategy.
In the case of Brave Frontier Heroes, these synergies were further enhanced. As it shared a technology platform and a development studio with My Crypto Heroes. In addition, some character NFTs could be shared between both games.
The result was a successful launch. With 37% of Brave Frontier Heroes’ sustained audience over one month coming from My Crypto Heroes.
Conversely, during this period, there was no evidence that the launch of Brave Frontier Heroes cannibalized My Crypto Heroes’ audience.
