Week 38

The platform ecosystem shrank on almost every dimension this week. Active islands fell 14.1% to 43,382, the active-to-total ratio dropped to 14.2% (down 12.7 points), and the inactive pool grew to 248,263 islands, now 3% larger than last week. The island flow tells the story cleanly: 3,911 new islands were published but 2,402 were removed, leaving a net gain of just 1,523 islands, and that net gain is far smaller than prior weeks. New creator registrations fell 38.1% to 478, the largest single-week drop in the recent data set. Total registered creators rose a modest 0.6% to 77,340, but that cumulative number masks the sharp deceleration at the entry point. For established creators, the falling active ratio means the field of competing live islands is actually thinning, which can improve Discover visibility for those who stay active.

Session length is essentially flat at 12.8 minutes per session (down just 0.2%), which is the one stable metric in an otherwise declining week. That stability matters because it means players who are showing up are engaging just as deeply as before; the problem is fewer players are showing up. Daily Island Players (per-island sum) fell 9.6% to 35.4 million, and total minutes declined 10.7% to 9.72 billion, tracking almost exactly with the plays decline rather than outpacing it. The favorite-to-play ratio dropped 11.5% to 0.0043, meaning players are favoriting less frequently relative to plays, a warning sign for organic re-engagement loops. The recommend-to-play ratio, however, rose 7.8% to 0.00297, the one conversion bright spot: players who did play were slightly more likely to recommend. For creators, the divergence between falling favorites and rising recommendations points to a practical lever: recommendation prompts inside the experience may be outperforming passive favoriting this week.

Top by Uniques

The top-uniques list is a study in defensive strength rather than growth. All ten UGC islands held their prior-week ranks, but eight of the ten posted week-over-week declines in the 4-16% range, tracking the platform-wide contraction. The two exceptions are telling: Piece Control 1v1 (bullseye) gained 2.9% and STEAL THE BRAINROT (ferins) fell only 1%, both meaningfully outperforming the market. The top-growth list is where the interesting narrative sits. Cross Country - Drive (reeyawn) posted a 106,220% unique-player gain from a near-zero base, and SUPERMARKET PROP HUNT (mrprophuntstudio) reached 10,234 uniques on a 23,159% surge after already appearing in last week's growth list, suggesting a second wave rather than a one-day spike. GARDEN HAVOC GUN GAME ONE SHOT (enigma.yt) reached 12,522 uniques from zero with a 15,751% jump. The common thread across the breakouts is genre diversity: driving, prop hunt, gun game, and a Godzilla boss battle all cracked the top five, indicating that viral lift this week came from differentiated concepts rather than chasing the dominant brainrot theme.

D1 / D7 Retention Distribution

0-5% bucket WoW: -17614 islands (D1), -28541 islands (D7) · 90-100% bucket WoW: -210 islands (D1), -66 islands (D7)

The platform-wide D1 average of 37.5% is essentially flat, up just 0.20 percentage points week-over-week, while D7 improved by 1.34 percentage points to 25.7%. That D7 improvement in a contracting week is counterintuitive and worth examining: it likely reflects a survivorship effect where the islands still attracting players in a down week are disproportionately the stickier ones. The bucket distributions reinforce this. The zero-to-near-zero D1 bucket (64,243 islands) shrank by 17,614, nearly as large as the total drop in active islands, meaning the islands that lost traffic this week were predominantly those with no day-one retention to begin with. REALISTIC ENDGAME DUOS (pandvil) entered the D1 chart at rank 5 with 59.5% and immediately topped the D7 chart at 83%, the highest D7 figure in the data set. That combination of debut-week D1 and D7 numbers is exceptional and warrants watching. Among established high-retention islands, 1V1 PRO clean (infinitepixel) held D1 at 77.7% and D7 at 81.5%, numbers that are elite by any benchmark. The RAE leaderboard shows tycoon-format islands dominating the replay-adjusted metric: FREE BUILDING PRACTICE 1V1 (bnstudios) leads with a RAE of 671.9, and Star Wars Droid Tycoon (foad) places in both the D1 and D7 top five while also holding a RAE above 93, confirming that the tycoon loop is producing genuine stickiness rather than just high session counts.

The top ten creator league is effectively a two-tier structure this week. Hive sits in a league of its own with 13.67 million uniques across 13 islands, more than 31% above the second-place total, though that lead came with a 14.5% week-over-week decline. Bullseye (rank 2, 10.44 million uniques across 22 islands) has the deepest portfolio in the table but a lower plays-per-island efficiency than ferins, who reached 5.31 million uniques from just 6 islands and generated 24.48 million total plays, the highest plays total in the table. Ferins also carries the highest creator-level D1 retention at 54.2% and the largest peak CCU sum at 789,937, more than nine times hive's 86,024. That contrast is the clearest illustration of the reach-versus-depth trade-off in the leaderboard: hive owns breadth, ferins owns intensity. Theboydilly (rank 4) and prettyboy (rank 6) each posted declines above 14%, among the steepest in the group, while rvb (rank 5) fell only 6.6%, suggesting its multi-island portfolio is better diversified against weekly demand shifts.

Average minutes per player at the top of the quality chart remain extraordinary and largely static: heny62 holds the top three positions with values of 997, 981, and 958 minutes per unique player, numbers that reflect dedicated micro-communities rather than mass traffic. The more actionable story is in the growth sub-lists. On peak CCU growth, CRAZY RAMP (primelab) led with a 13,900% surge to a peak of 560, while SUPERMARKET PROP HUNT (mrprophuntstudio) appeared in both the peak CCU and unique-player growth leaderboards, confirming that its breakout was concurrent and not staggered. On unique-player growth, Cross Country - Drive (reeyawn) led the field at 106,220% but reached only 5,316 uniques, a meaningful audience for a new island but still small in absolute terms. On session-depth growth, Colors Deathmatch I. (bazsko) saw average minutes per player rise 6,029% to 143 minutes, the kind of step change that typically signals a content update or a newly activated community. The recommendation growth list is dominated by social and chill-format islands: VIBE LOUNGE (renon) led at 4,100% recommendation growth, TABLE FOOTBALL (love-is-real) reached 340 recommendations on a 2,515% gain. Chill and social formats are punching above their traffic weight on social signals this week.

Category Share of Plays

Fastest-Growing Categories

Top Categories by D1

Category Intensity (Plays / Island)

Among IP-branded categories, Star Wars holds a commanding 40.6% share of category plays with 7.47 million, more than double the next category. The intensity metric reveals the structural difference between categories: KPOP DEMON HUNTERS leads at 2,202 plays per island, Star Wars and LEGO are tied at 1,739, and TMNT sits at only 183 plays per island, the widest spread in the table. A low intensity figure like TMNT's means each island in that category is converting very little of the available category audience, which is a useful signal about how crowded or how underpowered the island catalog is within that brand. On retention, Star Wars leads the category D1 table at 12.7%, with Rocket Racing (11.1%) and TMNT (11.0%) close behind, while KPOP DEMON HUNTERS sits at 9.9% despite its high intensity, suggesting its plays are coming from returning players in a tight loop rather than strong new-player conversion. Every category in the fastest-growing table posted a decline this week, consistent with the platform-wide contraction, with Squid Game falling least at 6.5%. The genre weekly data is omitted this week due to the warehouse migration flip, where island counts and CCU are measured by two instruments that are not comparable on the same chart. That rollup resumes once a full report week sits entirely on one side of the flip.

Islands by Genre

Top Chart Position This Week

Biggest Chart Movers

Movers computed among top-100 chart positions.

Supply vs. Exposure

Retired 2026-09-18: the Discover genre row this measured no longer exists.

Epic's genre chart (a separate system from the category rows above) shows island supply contracting across every genre this week, with Party & Mini Games falling 10.2%, Strategy down 10.1%, Roguelike down 10.8%, and Shooter down 9.6%. The most supply-stable genre is Horror, which fell only 1.5% to 5,012 islands. Simulation & Tycoon is the second most stable at a 4.4% decline to 5,174 islands. On the chart-position leaderboard, full seven-day data is available (days available equals days requested, seven days). PILLARS (hive) held the number-one position in Party & Mini Games for all seven days, Murder Mystery (goodgamers) held number one in Horror for the full week, and Bed Wars (goodgamers) held the Strategy top spot for seven straight days, giving goodgamers rare dual-genre chart dominance. GO UP FOR BRAINROTS (ferins) averaged rank 1 in Simulation & Tycoon for all seven days. Adventure & RPG and Sports & Racing each show a top-chart island present for only one day, suggesting those slots are more contested or that the chart leader changed within the week. On chart movers, the largest climber was Piece Control 1v1 (bullseye) in Battle Royale, improving from an average rank of 84.4 to 20, a delta of 64.4 positions. RESPECT TOWN (k66) moved from 46.3 to 1.7 in Roleplaying & Social, a 44.6-position gain across six days present. In Simulation & Tycoon, both ANIME CARDS TYCOON (ma-da, up 38.3 positions) and FRUITS VS BRAINROTS (pandvil, up 37.4 positions) made significant climbs, indicating the genre chart itself is seeing meaningful churn below the top positions even as the leader slot remains static.

The platform-wide favorite-to-play ratio fell 11.5% this week, making conversion efficiency a more pressing concern than in prior weeks. The fav-per-player leaderboard is populated almost entirely by small-traffic islands where a handful of highly engaged players are driving outsized favoriting behavior; Shining Moon (litaaws) leads at 1.4 favorites per player, which is only possible at very low play counts. The recommend-to-play ratio's 7.8% gain is the more useful signal for creators with mid-size audiences: players are recommending more freely than they are favoriting, which suggests that in-experience social prompts are currently more effective than passive library-building. The concrete lever here is to redirect your end-of-session call-to-action from a favorites prompt to a recommendation prompt while the platform-wide recommendation ratio is trending up.

The immediate question for next week is whether the Week 38 contraction stabilises or deepens. Both new-island submissions and new-creator registrations fell far harder than platform play metrics, meaning the supply side is responding faster to softer demand than the demand side is falling. If that pattern continues, the active-island count will compress further, which should concentrate Discover surface area on fewer islands and benefit established live experiences. Watch REALISTIC ENDGAME DUOS (pandvil) closely: a debut-week D7 of 83% is the kind of retention signal that precedes a significant CCU climb in weeks two and three. GROW THE BRAINROT (takuman_kamikz) is the clearest compounder in the ecosystem right now, and its trajectory across CCU, retention, RAE, and replay metrics suggests it has not peaked. The Star Wars IP window remains the dominant category by plays share at 40.6%, but its 10.2% week-over-week decline matches the platform average, so there is no category-level tailwind to rely on heading into Week 39.