This post is a bit of a detective story
While these developments are still far in the future (2024 or 2025+), I think very few on Hive are aware of what has been going on "behind the scenes" so to speak. One has to look at different sources over a longer time frame to put the pieces together.
My premises are this: Splinterlands is aiming to develop games on the Koinos blockchain and could even be looking to move Splinterlands itself there. Obviously the second premise would have far reaching implications for Hive as it is the most successful Dapp on the chain. But it also seems less likely for now.
Interview on the Koin Press
On March 14th 2022 
These are not direct quotes, but he basically said:
- The Splinterlands team is not "all in" on Hive
- They are open to other blockchains as long as they far fast and fee-less
Article on PRNewsWire
On August 31st 2022 we had an article about Koinos in which we get a quote from Aggroed
Jesse "Aggroed" Reich, CEO and Co-Founder of Splinterlands, the top play-to-earn blockchain game, said "Koinos could be revolutionary for gaming because there are a lot of additional costs that come from building on a blockchain, like account and NFT creation costs, all of which Koinos will eliminate."
The meaning in this quote is subtle, but could reveal a major motivation for the interest in Koinos. What Aggroed is pointing to here is that there are heavy costs involved with building games on a blockchain, namely account and NFT creation costs.
We often think that Hive is a fee-less chain, but this is actually not quite accurate. There is a hefty fee involved when creating an account. This is especially so, if one wants to create thousands of accounts as even whale accounts do not have enough Resource Credits to be able claim enough. On Koinos there are 0 account creation costs, since an account just consists of a wallet address that does not need to be stored on chain. This is probably the greatest advantage that Koinos has over Hive.
Koinos Pro funding secured
On January 10th 2023 KoinosGroup announced that they had secured a $500k seed round
from BlockChainFF and @Splinterlands.
The significance here is that Splinterlands gave the Koinos Group significant funding of probably over $100k so that Koinos could establish "Koinos Pro" which is intended to help developers to build Dapps on Koinos. In other words, Splinterlands probably did this so they could be receiving help in the future to build a game on the blockchain. It also shows that Koinos is something they want to get involved with in the future as they probably would not have donated such a large amount of money otherwise.
Town hall
On February 21st 2023 we had a Town Hall on which Aggroed stated more about being "tied" to Hive
Aggroed here says that the team might integrate different chains in the future
"I am not permanently married to Hive. I do think that Hive is the single best place right now for us to be operating, but who knows how that looks in the next couple of years. Blockchain develops very rapidly." ... "There could be other chains that we work with or work on".
While he assures everyone that Splinterlands will not be moving anywhere in the near future, he also opens up the possibility that the SPS Validator chain could in principle be moved to another chain.
Conlcusions
From my little research it seems very clear to me that the Splinterlands team is planning on utilizing the Koinos (or other) blockchain in the future (2024/2025+). We cannot say for certain if the team is planning on only expanding to other chains and build games there or if they intend to move the Splinterlands game itself there one day. The most convincing argument for that latter development could be due to the high account creation fees on Hive. Why spend millions $$ if one can truly get free accounts on Koinos?
It would be more of a bummer if Splinterlands one day moves from Hive to another chain as its success has also propelled Hive to higher levels. My hope is that until then (if it should happen) Hive will have many more successfull Dapps so that it won't be that big of a deal. Then again, it would be rather a very big undertaking to move such a big game somewhere else. Maybe we can come up with a solution on Hive, like the proposed market for account tokens "dacter" that should lower the account creation costs.
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