High Score: DeHub Gaming Hits 5,000+ Monthly Active Users
By DeHub Team — 2022-01-02
The arcade passed 5,000 monthly active gamers in Q1 2022, the same quarter it launched.
Why we track gamers separately
DeHub has several distinct things a person can be. A holder is not a viewer. A viewer is not a creator. A gamer is none of the above, and lumping them into a single "active user" figure hides more than it reveals.
Separating them meant we could see something specific: the arcade was pulling people who were not there for the token. A meaningful share of arcade usage in that first quarter came from people whose relationship with DeHub was "I play the games", which is exactly the audience a project built on tokenomics normally never reaches.
The metric behind the metric
Monthly actives is a headline number and a weak one. It rewards a good launch and tells you nothing about whether the thing is alive.
What we actually watched was day-over-day return on days with no announcement. Games are the only surface in the app that works without an input from us — a feed needs posts, a stream needs a creator online, an airdrop needs an airdrop. A game needs a person and a few minutes.
The arcade held up on those days, which is what made 5,000 worth reporting rather than just worth publishing.
What drove it
Three things, roughly in order of impact:
- Session length was short by design. Super Robin Hood and Tomb Runner are things you can play in the gap where you would otherwise scroll. Nothing in the arcade demanded a sitting.
- No separate onboarding. Because every title shared one identity and one wallet path, trying a second game cost nothing. Most of our per-user game counts were above one.
- The leaderboard gave a reason to return. On-chain leaderboards and rewards shipped in the same quarter, and a score that persists publicly is a much stronger return hook than a score that does not.
What we misread
We assumed competitive players would be the core and casual players the tail. It was the other way round. The overwhelming majority of sessions were short, casual and solo, and the competitive layer — while loud, and disproportionately represented in our community channels — was a small fraction of actual play.
That shaped later decisions. When friend challenges arrived the same quarter, they were built as a light overlay on solo play rather than as a competitive mode, precisely because the data said most people were not there to compete.
Why it still matters
Five thousand monthly gamers is not a large number in gaming terms and we have never pretended otherwise. What it bought was proof that the arcade could hold an audience with no token incentive attached, on a platform where almost everything else at the time depended on one. That is the reason the arcade survived every subsequent pivot in the roadmap.
The number that would have been better
Percentage of arcade users who were not holders.
We did not report it at the time and we should have, because it was the genuinely unusual thing about that quarter. A crypto project reaching people who do not hold its token is rare enough to be worth measuring deliberately rather than noticing in passing.
It also would have protected the arcade internally. For a period in 2023 there was a reasonable-sounding argument that the games should be more tightly coupled to token mechanics, on the basis that they were not contributing to the token economy. The counter-argument was that their entire value was reaching people the token could not — and it was much harder to make without a figure attached.