We hear the term “dead game” (opens in new tab)It’s an inflammatory way to judge live-service games for losing players, even in circumstances where they have hundreds of thousands of players. But what do you call a metaverse that has a low player count? A “dead metaverse?” “metacrypto?”

Last week, blockchain analytics firm DappRadar reported that the Ethereum-based metaverse Decentraland (opens in new tab) had just 38 daily active users with a peak of just 657 active users, numbers that would certainly inspire some “dead metaverse” talk. Decentraland, valued at over a billion dollars, has pushed back on that report, saying its daily users are in the thousands, thank you very much.

Decentralization led to Twitter to refute the reports, saying, “some websites are only tracking specific smart contract transactions but reporting them as DAU daily active users, which is inaccurate.” The company published its September user data showing a monthly active user count of 56,697 users.

Decentraland creative director Sam Hamilton said CoinDesk, “DappRadar doesn’t track our users, just people who interact with our contracts.” This means that the number of 38 players only counted users performing some kind of transaction on the blockchain, not anyone who logged in to chat with friends or play games.

“Imagine you only track the number of people who pay for something 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 According to Decentraland (a platform created by Decentraland to report user data, so take it with a grain of salt), the sandbox receives an average of 7,091 visitors per day over a 30-day period. That’s not what you get when you divide the monthly user count of 56,967 by 30 days, but Decentraland says we should “embark on a little mental arithmetic journey” in its blog to explain how he arrived at 7,091.

“You could first divide 56,697, the MAU number for September, by 30 and come up with the number 1,866. ‘That’s not 8k DAU!’ you scoff at yourself. But wait – 1,866 would be the DAU number if each of those 56,697 unique individuals visited Decentraland just once in the month of September, and that’s not what’s happening.”

Decentraland goes on to say that “a large number of Decentraland users are returning visitors; they are the Decentraland community and spend time on the platform regularly.”

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

Considering the large financial investments that some companies have made in Decentraland, especially in virtual real estate (opens in new tab)You can imagine how the company would like to make sure the world knows that its virtual world has more than 38 people around.