Chaos Legion is not gone yet and Rebellion is probably 7-9 months out but its not stopping the team and the community from talking about it so I figured I'd throw my hat in the ring for release ideas. This is for rebellion and every pack going forward assuming it works well.
I know I've mentioned this before but usually its buried inside another post. Let's make it standalone.
Here's the idea:
New sets are released every 12 months. It's a much smaller release but more expensive. There are no breaks between set releases. A small amount of packs would be released on the first of each month. Once that lot is sold, they are gone untl next month. If any packs remain at the middle of the month, they are taken off the market to create a 2 week dry period.
Packs would start out very expensive but would get cheaper each new release. The airdrop would happen on each new release. There would be no deals or special sales.
20% of the pack proceeds go to the DAO.
There is no mini set.
Tokenomics:
- Rebellion is a much smaller release (3.6 million packs)
- 3 million packs will be sold
- 600k packs would be given out in reward chests
- Price drops monthly
- No mini set
Pricing:
- First tranche costs $15 per pack
- Each month after it drops $1
- The last month would cost $4
- No special sales. No presales. No rewards for buying lots of packs (other than airdrop chance). No whale games.
- Creates $22.8 million in revenue for the team and $5.7 million for the DAO
Sale structure:
- Set sale lasts for one year
- The 1st of every month 250k packs go on sale
- If not sold out by the 16th, all remaining packs are taken down. Nothing is on sale the second half of the month ever.
- Pack prices drop on each new release
- Airdrop coincides with each new months tranche
- Guaranteed airdrop for each 50 packs bought. This would increase by 25-50 each release.
- After 12 releases and 12 airdrops, the next set is released. So if Rebellion releases January 1 2024, the last tranche for Rebellion would be Dec 1st 2024. The next set will release January 1 2025.
- All unsold packs at the end of the year get put up on the non card market by the team for $20 until they sell out. (roughly Untamed/Dice secondary market price)
Scarcity
If you don't get your packs before they sell out or the two weeks is up, they just aren't available until next month. This means for at least half of the cumulative year, there would be no packs on the market.
Cards will remain scarce because there's not an over-release. 18 million bcx vs 75 million for CL
It would take time for enough cards to get out on the market to level cards up. There would be very few maxed copies of cards in the first few months, as opposed to now where there are tons on day one of a release. Even by the end of the release it would not be nearly as many as now though.
We would shift the narrative away from needing to max every card and toward a game of needing to decide which cards to level up. Decks would vary even at the higher modern leagues.
Routine Buzz
Card and pack releases would be predictable. We know new packs hit the market the first of every month and that every 13th release is a whole new card set.
There would always be a buzz. The beginning of each month would be an event with new packs hitting the market that are slightly cheaper than ever before and a new airdrop card would hit at the same time, meaning there would be a meta change on each months release. Each time packs came out, content creators would talk about the new card and the sales figures.
Compare this to the mid year slog when nothing is happening at all and they have to create whale sales that dilute everyones value in order to move any packs. The in the final few months not only would packs be much cheaper but there'd also be talk of the new set coming up.
As packs got cheaper toward the final months, players would need to choose between buying those cheap packs to finish leveling up cards or to save their cash for the next release.
Revenue
While on the surface it looks like a pretty big revenue decrease for the team (15 million CL packs * $4 = $60 million down to $22.8 million) when you remove the discounts, free packs to whales, and burns needed to sell through CL. It's probably not as big of a hit as it seems. Plus, the cards remain scarce so it doesn't tank the economy. A growing economy will always be more profitable for the team in other ways.
Odds and ends
It would feel really special to win a pack from a chest, especially in the beginning when packs are over $10 and the cards are very scarce still.
The DAO would set a precedent of being paid for a contractor accessing the economy instead of having free work done for it like it in the current mini set way. It's a far more decentralized approach which will eventually allow the team to walk away.
If cards get really scarce with land, this will allow new pack releases to come out without ruining that scarcity. Even more so because no more minisets. Card inflation will be very predictable year after year and will hold their value as well as Untamed and Rift Watchers.
They could still do the quarterly promo card.
We can look back on sets by name or their year released, which I just kind of like.
I just think the whole thing is more sustainable and more fun.
Preempting predictable arguments
Yes, prices would go up. No, it wouldn't hurt the new player experience. Let's be real. Splinterlands is not a cheap game to play. A silver deck in modern costs hundreds, if not thousands of dollars and you're not exactly winning back that money with the .017 SPS coming out of a chest.
The time period that saw the most growth was not when assets were dirt cheap and abundant (we lost players then) but when things were screaming higher and it cost $15,000 to get the CP for silver. Fear and greed run markets and participation in them. Not smart investing.
No, it's not a better idea to just put out unlimited packs and burn what's not sold. You never want to meet demand unless you're selling iPhones or pizzas. If you're selling collectibles, you always want to be shy of meeting demand. This is especially true if you want an active secondary market. And you do want an active secondary market because that is what drives the economy.
SPlinterlands assets are meant to be scarce. The literal definition of scarce is a supply that doesn't meet demand. Selling as many as you can and burning the rest means assets cannot be scarce by definition.
What do you think?
That's my idea for pack releases going forward. Let me know what you think. Is it better than what they've done in the past? Are you freaked out because prices would increase? Do you have a better idea? Am I missing something? Let me know.