It finally happened, happened
I'm slightly mad, oh dear
Queen
Back in March 2020 I made a note about my forced inwastement of $28.95 into SPLINTERLANDS card game and how desperately I wanted my pennies back. At last my Golden Baby Unicorn helped me and recently my dream came true! I was able to withdraw about 50K DEC, to swap it into TRX and to sell TRX at BINANCE at ~0.34 USDT.
And today I've got ca. 30 USDT sitting on my Binance account!
"Why didn't you reinvest your 50K DEC?", you might ask.
Well, I must confess, that today I'm much less impressed with Splinterlands as I used to be.
The guys behind the game might well be excellent code hackers, math wonderboys and crypto enthusiasts. But I think all this is not enough to build a successful CCG.
Let's have a look at the stats (the only Splinterlands stats I could find). The number of real players doubled from Jan to June 2020 (and god knows how many of them are bots) -- and then stalled at about 6000. Well, six thousand users for nearly 2 years. And how much more the game is supposed to attract? If you remember, MTG in two years rose from a 8 persons hobby business into a corporation with a triple-digit million sales volume...
The game definitely lacks good promotion, because all those tons of shit posted at hive.blog and twitter is not "promotion", by no means. That's here Mr. Justin Sun's funds and talents would have been very helpful (regardless of what you think of his moral appearance).
The game definitely lacks good gameplay designers. The very problem of bots clearly indicates that something is very wrong with gameplay balance. Besides, the rewards system was only making "rich" players even "richer". And instead of hiring professionals to analyze and correct the gameplay, the devs decided to guard the rewards system (and "rich" players) from bots no matter what, at the expense of the new players...
As far as I can understand, the new Azmare packs are now sold for DEC only. At the same time it's not possible to buy DEC with Paypal. It's not even possible to convert the game's "credits" (which can be bought with Paypal) into DEC. In other words, ability to use Paypal was the game's great advantage from financial point of view -- the vast majority of the world's paying gamers still don't know about crypto and don't want to bother with it. But instead of developing integration with Paypal (and credit cards, for that matter), the devs decided to cut it down even further -- and to develop some shit like logging in with Wombat or WAX wallets... Well, it might look good for crypto development, but is not so good for the game's finances.
Recently many fans keep telling "With the new Azmare packs the DEC price will skyrocket!" -- so far it hasn't. They were also telling "With the new rules the card prices will skyrocket!" -- so far they haven't.
Well, whatever, nevermind.
My Splinterlands inwastement is now over -- and what is next?
Currently I own only one card of some "collectible value" -- a golden Dark Ha'on. At Peakmonsters it's priced at about $40, and its "burn value" of 50K DEC is about $0.00059x50K = $29.50 (not counting various overheads).
For the moment I'm going to keep it for a while and to continue my Splinterlands affair. Afterall, if to treat Splinterlands as a game and not as an "investment" -- it's still a funny cosy game to play it for half an hour before going to sleep.
