One of the highlights of blockchain gaming’s Q1 2024 bullrun was the launch of Skrice Studios’ Heroes of Mavia mobile strategy game through app stores, and its Ethereum-based MAVIA token in February. 

So how’s the game doing four months on?

In terms of the MAVIA token, its price peaked around $10 on 19th February and has since fallen steadily to today’s price of $1.85.

Looking at downloads, the data shows the game’s explosive launch in February and March, which was partly fuelled by the MAVIA token airdrop, leading to a spike in pre-registrations on the app stores and resulting in one million downloads on day one.

It then took 16 days for the announcement of two million downloads, and another 17 days for the announcement of three millions downloads. But the pace has slowed considerably since. It took 103 days from three million downloads to the announcement of four million.

In terms of daily active users, Skrice first dropped some numbers on DAUs on 17th February, highlighting a peak of 278,000 DAUs. Notably, Heroes of Mavia is currently pretty thin on blockchain integration so daily active unique wallets isn’t a relevant KPI, although this may change as new features roll out in the coming months.

The only mention of DAUs since then has been the recent announcement that the game has an average of +74,000, which we assume is the current daily player base.

This demonstrates that Heroes of Mavia has been struggling over the past couple of months to retain players. Of the 4 million downloads, 75% were within the initial month, but despite downloads going up slowly, DAUs are falling off quicker.

Taken as a crude calculation, 74,000 daily players from 4 million downloads is a retention rate over 4 months of less than 2%, which isn’t a strong metric.

One reason for this could be a lack of regular updates. 

During the four months since launching, the biggest new feature has been the in-game Ruby currency, which serves as an off-chain currency, but with the behaviour of an onchain currency.

Players can earn Ruby in-game and it’s the main currency for the game’s marketplace for skins and cosmetic items. Again, this feature launched with a spike in early May but activity has since dwindled.

Recently, however, Skrice has announced the start of what it calls Mavia Phase 2, with various new features rolling out, including

• A live PVP wage mode, in which two players are provided with the same set of troops to attack the same randomly-generated base, with the winner gaining the Ruby both wagered to enter, minus a fee. Significantly this will feed into the alliance mode, as alliances run their own Ruby treasury that players can use to play the PVP wage mode, with the winnings split between the players and the alliance.

• The ability to trade between in-game currency Ruby and Ethereum-based MAVIA token. This is a fairly complex process as MAVIA is a pure cryptocurrency, while Ruby isn’t a cryptocurrency but because it’s used to buy NFTs that are on the Base blockchain, it does have crypto-like qualities. 

• Tied to this, Skrice will run what it calls a dual order marketplace, which means that NFTs will be listed on a web-based marketplace, priced in MAVIA and Ruby, as well as the purely Ruby-based in-app marketplace. It will average the MAVIA-Ruby rate across all listings to ensure a solid exchange rate. The likely reason for this system is to get around app store restrictions about crypto, but it does make Ruby complex both in terms of concept and operation.

• In addition, features such as staking Ruby for MAVIA, bridging land NFTs to Base, the ability to rent land LP Mavia-Ruby staking pools, and the ability to earn 0.1% permanent royalties on trading fees for minting new legendary NFTs will gradually be released.

Releasing these new and exciting crypto features might be a sufficient way to improve retention and onboard new players, especially from guilds.

However, the flipside would be that these features will more likely re-engage the existing 50,000 or so players who hold the MAVIA token or the game’s NFTs rather than attract hundreds of thousands of web2 players who are looking for a new mobile strategy game.

Heroes of Mavia seems to have enough of the former cryptoheads but needs a lot more of the latter if it hopes to scale into being a game with millions of players.