Week 33

The platform added 984 new creators this week, a 64.8% spike over last week and by far the sharpest single-week intake in recent data. Total creators now stand at 73,585 (up 1.4%), and 4,447 new islands were published - an 11.2% jump in new supply. That supply expansion is outpacing active engagement, however: the active-island ratio (islands with 5-plus players) edged down 0.6% to 13.5%, meaning roughly 86.5% of the platform's 357,981 islands sit dormant. For established creators, a swelling new-creator class is not yet a competitive threat - most of those new islands will never reach the active threshold - but it does indicate that the top of the discovery funnel is getting more crowded, making differentiated quality more important than ever.

Daily Island Players (per-island sum) came in at 44.35 million, down just 0.6% week-over-week, while total plays actually rose 0.23% to 1.107 billion - a split that tells you players are distributing across more sessions rather than deeper ones. The average session dropped 1.8% to 12.7 minutes and total minutes fell 1.4%, confirming a slight shallowing in depth. The more important signal is the favorite-to-play ratio ticking up 0.37% and the recommend-to-play ratio up 0.46%: players are converting to fans at a marginally higher rate even as raw session time softens. Average minutes per unique player across active islands sits at 45.4 minutes - almost four sessions' worth - which means the audience that is sticking is going deep. Creators should read this as a quality-sorting week: casual traffic is up, deep engagement is slightly contracting, and the islands that hold both are standing out.

Top by Uniques

Two structural patterns connect the top-uniques and top-growth lists this week. First, the Brainrot theme has reached platform-defining scale: three ferins islands and neverty7's Fight The Brainrot together account for the top three UGC CCU slots, and seedoh's Merge The Brainrot posted the week's highest growth rate by an enormous margin - 646,939% week-over-week to 181,171 uniques. That is not a rounding artifact; it is a near-zero-to-meaningful launch on a culturally hot theme. Second, deathrun and parkour islands dominate the breakout list outside Brainrot: three separate deathrun/parkour titles appear in the top-growth uniques table (czz, shiroeii, hmos), and roguelike entries from ozycreates (ESCAPE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE, up 36,050%) and deliriumfactory (Sand & Saber, up 22,544%) signal that genre-adjacent breakouts are real this week. The common thread is thematic timing - every fast-mover either latches onto an active cultural moment or executes a proven genre formula with a fresh skin.

D1 / D7 Retention Distribution

0-5% bucket WoW: +15083 islands (D1), +22622 islands (D7) · 90-100% bucket WoW: +245 islands (D1), +82 islands (D7)

The platform's average D1 retention held at 39.9% and D7 at 25.8%, both effectively flat week-over-week, which is a stable baseline. The bucket distribution is the more instructive read: the largest single cohort - 78,531 islands - sits in the sub-10% D1 bucket, and this bucket grew by 15,083 islands week-over-week, which mirrors the new-island publishing surge noted in core activity. Most new launches evaporate quickly. At the other end, 4,811 islands exceeded 50% D1 retention, a healthy and growing high-performer tier. On the retention-adjusted engagement (RAE) leaderboard, Turbo Ramp Tycoon leads with a RAE score of 160, followed by Treasure Tycoon at 130 - both small-audience tycoons punching well above their traffic weight. Crucially, Star Wars Droid Tycoon (foad) and Fight The Brainrot (neverty7) appear in the top RAE list despite massive play volumes (3.49M and 10.4M plays respectively), confirming they are converting traffic into genuine loyalty, not just riding algorithmic exposure. Islands building for loyalty - not just viral spikes - should study these tycoon and combat-sim models.

Hive leads the leaderboard with 16.2 million uniques across 13 islands and a peak CCU sum of 90,021, but the week's sharpest portfolio jump belongs to 3dh, whose unique player count surged 28.3% week-over-week to 3.63 million - the only top-10 creator posting growth above 10% (pandvil was next at 9.3%). Ferins is the outlier from a different angle: just 6 islands generating 32.99 million total plays and a peak CCU sum of 616,042 - more than six times hive's CCU footprint on less than half the island count. That is the most concentrated, highest-velocity single-creator portfolio on the board. On the other end, bullseye operates 22 islands to reach 11.8 million uniques and 27.88 million plays, a volume-through-breadth strategy that produces solid reach but modest CCU concentration. The lesson for growing creators is that portfolio efficiency - plays and CCU per island - varies enormously: ferins generates over 5.5 million plays per island while prettyboy (24 islands, 4.71M uniques) generates around 277,000 per island.

The top of the average-minutes-per-player leaderboard is dominated by heny62, whose three distinct islands - hedge survival, hop mountain battle, and peak battle assault - average between 1,042 and 1,206 minutes per unique player. These are extreme outliers likely representing persistent sandbox or social experiences with very small but extremely loyal audiences, and their week-over-week growth rates (peak battle assault up 4,623%) suggest they are newly discovered rather than long-established. For creators targeting mainstream scale, the more instructive benchmark is Star Wars Droid Tycoon at an 88.7 RAE score with 1.41 million uniques - proof that deep per-player time can coexist with large audiences in the tycoon format. On the growth leaderboards, the recommendation growth list is the most actionable: seedoh's Merge The Brainrot generated 2,580 recommendations, up 257,900%, and ozycreates' ESCAPE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE added 5,038 recommendations, up 29,535%. Islands generating explosive recommendation growth while also growing uniques are the ones that have cracked the word-of-mouth loop - a signal that their core loop is compelling enough for players to actively endorse.

Category Share of Plays

Fastest-Growing Categories

Top Categories by D1

Category Intensity (Plays / Island)

Star Wars dominates the IP category leaderboard with 12.18 million plays and a 47.7% share - and at 3,149 plays per island, it carries the highest category intensity of any tracked brand, meaning the islands that exist in this category are generating far more traffic per island than any competing IP. KPOP DEMON HUNTERS is the week's momentum story outside Star Wars, up 18.3% week-over-week to 2.86 million plays, while The Walking Dead Universe posted the most dramatic single-week acceleration at 80.9% growth to 1.97 million plays - a category worth watching closely for early positioning.

Genre Leaderboards

Player-weighted across each genre's islands. Peak CCU is the sum of island peak concurrents; retention is the returning-player rate.

Genre Weekly Rollup

Islands by Genre

Top Chart Position This Week

Averaged over 6 days of available data.

Biggest Chart Movers

Movers computed among top-100 chart positions.

Movers computed from 6 days this week vs 6 days last week of available data.

Supply vs. Exposure

Note that this week's averaged chart ranks reflect 6 of the 7 requested days - one day of data is missing - so ranks are slightly less stable than a full-week read. In terms of genre supply, Roguelike posted the fastest island count growth at 11.5% week-over-week to 292 total islands, followed by Survival at 7.3% (4,456 islands) and Simulation & Tycoon at 6.8% (5,469 islands). Shooter remains the largest genre by a wide margin at 61,195 islands. On the chart itself - which is Epic's own ranking system and does not directly reflect plays volume - Fight The Brainrot by neverty7 held the top Simulation & Tycoon chart position with an average rank of 1.3 across 6 days present; ANIMAL HOSPITAL: ANOMALY [HORROR] by ccstudios locked the #1 Horror slot for the full 6 days; and PILLARS by hive held #1 in Party & Mini Games for all 6 days. The week's largest chart climbers were in Shooter and Sports & Racing: Piece Control 3v3 by bullseye jumped from rank 60 to 9.8 (a 50.2-position gain), and TERMINAL DRIVE by sk-1883 climbed from 67.8 to 19.2 (up 48.7 positions). On supply exposure: Shooter shows 61,195 total islands against 230 currently in the Discover row; Strategy shows 5,428 total islands against 220 row slots; Simulation & Tycoon shows 5,469 total islands against 158 row slots.

The favorites-per-player leaderboard this week is led by two hippogamer islands - HIPPO 1V1 and HIPPO ZONE WARS - both above 4.7 favorites per player, with week-over-week growth of 3,194% and 12,197% respectively. These numbers reflect tiny absolute player bases where one superfan can move the ratio dramatically, so treat them as signals of strong identity rather than scalable benchmarks. The more actionable conversion read is at the recommendation level: Tilted Gacha Pon Zone Wars by kaitou achieved a 1.0 recommend-per-player ratio - every player recommended it - and its recommend-per-player count tripled week-over-week. For most creators, closing the gap between play and recommendation is the highest-leverage conversion lever available, and the pattern among leaders is consistent: tight community themes (zone wars variants, 1v1 build fights) with named creator identities generate the most organic endorsement. If your island lacks a clear identity that players want to share, that is the first thing to fix before optimizing anything else.

Three dynamics are worth tracking closely into Week 34. First, whether Battle Royale's 183% CCU spike - which may reflect a platform event or content drop - sustains or retraces, since its direction will influence how much overflow traffic reaches UGC islands on the Discover page. Second, The Walking Dead Universe's 80.9% week-over-week growth makes it the fastest-accelerating IP category on the board; if that momentum holds, early positioning in that category could pay off significantly before supply catches up. Third, the Roguelike genre added 11.5% more islands in a single week while carrying the highest opportunity score in the data - if that supply acceleration continues, the window for uncrowded entry narrows. Watch whether the new-creator registration spike (up 64.8%) translates into a second-week retention challenge or whether those creators publish and persist.