Wizards of the Coast announced that players have played one billion games of Magic on MTG Arena since it entered Open Beta in September 2018. They’re celebrating with an MTG Arena code for a free War of the Spark Booster pack: OneBillion.
MTG Arena was first revealed in September 2017 and entered Closed Beta in two months later. During its 10-month Closed Beta, players played 110 million games and went through multiple economy changes.
Since then, Wizards has periodically revealed the number of games played on MTG Arena. It went into an Open Beta on September 29, 2018 and players played 17 million games during it’s first weekend. Less than a month later, Wizards reported that players had played 100 million games, which steadily rose to 347 million games by the end of the year. At Toy Fair In February 2019, CEO Chris Cocks said that MTG Arena had passed half a billion games played in its Open Beta, which leads to today’s announcement that the game had surpassed the one billion games played milestone.
Games played in MTG Arena’s Open Beta using the five data points Wizards has made public (09/27/18, 09/30/18, 10/26/18, 1/1/19, 02/15/19, 06/4/19)
Taken together, those publicly available numbers show relatively flat growth in the games played on MTG Arena over the last year.
MTG Arena is still in its Beta phase of development and is being used for massive esports competitions, like the Mythic Invitational in at PAX East and the upcoming Mythic Championship III in June. The games played metric is only one aspect of MTG Arena’s growth—in February’s Toy Fair presentation, Cocks also said that that player acquisition was “fast-growing” and that the average amount of money spent by players was up.
Slide from Hasbro’s Toy Fair 2019 presentation