According to data from Nudge, AppsFlyer/Adjust, GameAnalytics, and Libre logs, in large-scale online environments — like metaverse platforms, MMOs, and SLGs — monthly retention has dropped significantly. Around 2020, the average monthly retention fell from 20–30% down to 10–20%.

There are many reasons for player churn. But one key observation is:
Once the active player base drops below a certain threshold, both new player onboarding and existing player retention fall off a cliff.
So the question is — how do we fight back against this downward spiral?

One answer is to raise the ceiling on how many players can interact in the same world from day one.
A larger active base delays hitting the churn threshold, giving developers more time and space to make adjustments and win players back.

But how do we actually increase the number of concurrently interactive players in a game world?

Traditionally, server capacity has been limited by hardware and technical constraints.
To work around that, some developers adopted client-side lockstep or deterministic sync models, offloading logic to the client to reduce both server load and bandwidth usage.

While this approach helps reduce dev and operational costs, it introduces a serious long-term risk:
data security.

From experience, we know clients can and do cheat — using memory editors, packet spoofing, or custom clients.
Once that happens, data diverges between clients and the entire shared world risks breaking consistency.
This is especially dangerous for games or platforms that are meant to run long-term.

You could use consensus or majority-vote strategies to reduce the impact — but those methods add latency, making them hard to apply in real-time games or metaverse apps.

Another problem: when players are alone in a scene, many game actions — especially random outcomes — are untraceable.
Without server-side validation, players can exploit this to generate rare items or skip progression, breaking the game’s balance.

Syndream avoids these issues by keeping a server-authoritative architecture, running logic across trusted distributed nodes.
It provides massive capacity — supporting over 100,000 interactive players in a single world,
while maintaining data consistency and security — making it possible to build a long-term, large-scale virtual world.

Want to learn more?
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