Through further analysis, we find that the main reason for the rapid increase in the game popularity was the increase of public attention by media outlets, while the reasons for the rapid decline in the game popularity include the oversupply of kitties, the decreasing of player income, a widening gap between the rich and poor players, and the limitations of blockchain systems. Since then, a few big players have gradually dominated the game, concentrating the game resources. We find that a large number of players poured in during the 10th and 18th days since the game release and quickly exited in the following month. We construct a temporal kitty ownership transfer network and analyze the varying network parameters in the four stages.

Based on the numbers of addresses involved in the game each day, we divide the game progress into four stages: the primer, the rise, the fall, and the serenity. First, we extracted the five million transaction records among 100 thousand addresses involved in CryptoKitties in the past three years. This study analyzes its entire player activity history for the first time in literature and tries to find the reasons for the rise and fall of this first blockchain game mania. The game gained explosive growth upon its release but quickly collapsed in a short time. Players could own, breed, and trade kitties, which are the only prop in the game. 2Web Mining Laboratory, Department of Media and Communication, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, ChinaĬryptoKitties was the first widely recognized blockchain game.

1School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, China.

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