State of the Market

[Tad Carlucci]

As we're all aware, it's quite common to complain about the state of the market. Those complaints are based upon perceptions such as whether the prices seem to be falling, whether one seems to be selling more, or less, than normal. But the question is, does any of this reflect what's actually happening?

Occasionally, I take a look at the actual performance: how many cats are out there breeding, and how many boxes are they producing.

For KittyCatS these numbers are a bit hard to produce because, while the information is there on the web pages, it's hidden from normal view. In addition, it's run through what we call a "block cypher" .. an attempt to obscure the meaning. Luckily, the scheme used is weak and can be analyzed to produce generally usable data.

I don't do this often because, quite frankly, it doesn't really change all that much for KittyCatS. If you're looking at the population dynamics KittyCatS are just plain boring! Populations are fairly stable. Players come, and some go, but most tend to stay and play a long time.

Anyway, I just took a quick look at the limited data I have available and can make the following estimates:

To date, about 1.2 million KittyCatS boxes have been created.

At present, and in general, over the past many months, there are about 30,000 to 32,000 KittyCatS breeding. This appears to have been the case for most of the past year. There were brief downward spikes around the past September. I attribute those to outside influences .. most likely something to do with other breedable products being opened of testing or going to market. Spikes like this generally are due to competitive actions or systemic problems (such as servers going offline for a day).

Those breeding parents produce about 2,000 boxes, per day. This rate has been very stable over most of the past year. There is a slight downward trend of -0.018% to this rate, but it does not appear statistically significant.

In general, KittyCatS populations are extremely stable and, while we often see complaints about the state of the market, the data strongly indicates that those perceptions do not reflect reality.