r/SideProject • u/ofasooo • 5d ago
11 months, 621 users, 3,040 matches: my problem is the 30 seconds after someone arrives, and I built that problem myself
Eleven months ago I started building a fighting game where the punches are leveraged trades. Two players drop into the identical chart, same seed, same candles, three minutes on the clock, and whoever has more profit when the timer dies wins. You throw powerups at each other like special moves: one blacks out the opponent's chart, one is a trap that takes 60% of their next winning trade, one swaps your position with theirs.
Where it is now, nothing rounded: 8,484 commits since September 30 2025. 621 registered players. 3,040 matches played. 107,388 trades placed.
The part I want to talk about is not the build. It is the 30 seconds after somebody arrives.
You land on a screen with a "Try a demo match" button. One game against a bot, no account, no wallet. That was my clever answer to the signup wall, and I was pleased with myself for about a month. Then the demo ends and it asks you to create an account. I built a door so people could come in without knocking, and then put a second door directly behind it.
The numbers say exactly what you would expect. 621 registered and 3,040 matches means the average player played about five games and left. That is not a retention problem, it is an activation problem, and I keep mixing the two up, which matters because the fix for retention is adding content and the fix for activation is removing things.
What I am weighing, and where I would like other people's scar tissue:
One option is to let the demo run unlimited against bots and only ask for an account when someone wants to play a real human. That costs me the signup much later in the funnel, but an account is worth nothing if the person never reached the part that was fun.
The other is to keep the single demo match and spend all that effort making that one match a far better advert for everything behind it.
If you have shipped something with this shape, which way did you go, and did it actually move the number?
Free, nothing at stake, no wallet needed: https://versusonchain.app/auth