I have heard the term "dead game (open in new tab)." It's an inflammatory way to criticize live-service games that have lost players, even in situations where they have hundreds of thousands of players. But what do we call a metaverse with a low player count?" A "dead metaverse"? Metacrypt?

Last week, blockchain analytics firm DappRadar reported that Ethereum-based metaverse Decentraland (open in new tab) had 38 active users daily and only 657 at its peak, valued at over $1 billion! Decentraland pushed back on this report, stating that the daily user count is actually in the thousands, thank you very much.

Decentraland responded to the report on Twitter, stating that "some websites only track certain smart contract transactions but report them as daily active user DAUs, which is inaccurate." The company posted September user data showing 56,697 monthly active users.

Sam Hamilton, Decentraland's creative director, told CoinDesk that "DappRadar does not track our users, only the people interacting with our contracts. In other words, the 38 number only counts users who perform some kind of transaction on the blockchain, not those who log in to chat with friends or play games. Imagine tracking only the number of people who paid at the checkout counter in a shopping mall," he told Coindesk. 'That doesn't mean there aren't a lot of passersby.'

According to DCL Metrics (a platform created by Decentraland to report user data, so take it with a grain of salt), the sandbox has an average of 7,091 visitors per day over 30 days. This is not what happens when you divide 56,967 monthly users by 30 days, but to explain why 7,091 users was reached, Decentraland said on its blog that one should "take a little mental arithmetic journey."

"Dividing the September MAU of 56,697 by 30 returns the number 1,866. However, the 1,866 figure is the number of DAUs for 56,697 unique users who visited Decentraland only once during the month of September, which is not what happened." Decentraland continued, "Many of Decentraland's users are repeat visitors, they are the Decentraland community and regularly spend time on the platform."

DappRadar acknowledged in this blog post (opens in new tab) that it does not measure activity outside of the blockchain ecosystem and is currently working with the Decentraland team to report more accurate user metrics.

Given that several companies have made significant financial investments in Decentraland, especially virtual real estate (opens in new tab), one can imagine that the company wants the world to know that there are more than 38 people hanging out in its virtual world.