Its the end of the year, a wonderful year, and as I sit down to write I have a lot in front of me, a lot on my mind. I have been spending some more time away from the screen, around the farm and with family, and this is a good thing. So coming back to write, I am beset by many different topics that could use some words from me.
But I will fall back on my tried and true, my first crypto-gaming love, dCity. After all, I am president, and bear some responsibility to keep open lines of communication about everything that is going on. And so here we go.
The price of SIM is down - can't devs do something???
This is a good of a place to start as any. Times are tough, and while these things move in cycles, there is more to the story than just this. But we are definitely in a down time. This could be due to a few reasons:
- Perceived start of bull market - players reallocate assets
- Confusion and Disillusionment over the latest popularity change
- General FUD about price going down - follow on selling
Now I am not sure if we are out of the woods yet, but I think I have finally figured out what is happening. Let me go through this a bit for you all, so at least you can understand, if not feel better, about what is happening.
So I began to notice the market price for some of the cards, not just the offers, but the bids were falling away. Now the market can be a little tricky to use (check out https://nftm.art/buy/city if you don't have enough patience), and is due for an update in 2024. But people are absolutely dumping. At first, I noticed it with some particular cards, like nuclear plants, that made me believe that people were balancing their cities after the popularity update.
And there is one player in particular who did this very aggressively. He still has a nice little city, but he sold a lot of cards. Just today I bought 3316 Stadiums from him.
And you know what he did with that 2.5M SIM? That's right - dump it.
Not even chunky like, just EVERY SINGLE SIM straight into the pool. And hey, people can do what they want with their tokens, that is the beauty of this whole thing.
So as I was scooping up underpriced solar panels and stadiums, I was actually participating in this dump off in price. And this guy is not the only one.
There has been a new wave recently of people offering to sell their entire city. Some people do not have the time or patience to keep up with learning the new rules, updates and movements. You may or may not be suprised that many of these have hundreds of students IN DEBT - and may not even realize that they are like, 3 clicks away from a much more optimized city. But nonetheless, stymied by their city's lack of current profitability and performance, they will seek some amount of instant payoff for their assets.
I very frequently make an offer on these types of whole city buyouts. Some of the best deals of my life have been made this way, but most people think I'm a jerk (even when I sometimes consider myself being generous). That's okay, I don't mind being a jerk in this case. If you think its worth more, go ahead and spend a month using the market - or wait until it gets an upgrade.
But the point is - these types of off market deals (if they are made in HIVE or HBD), do not push down the price of SIM. Unless of course I need to rapidly flip half of these NFTs in order to make offers on new dumper's cities. Sigh, such is life, such are the cycles we live through.
So, like, is dCity dead?
I personally don't think so. I just bought 3318 Stadiums today at a price that my own napkin calculations are telling me will net 43% APR just on the ENTRY tokens, to say nothing of the 33180 popularity and the currently less helpful 49770 income stats on the cards.
I'm still having fun, although I suppose I have to be careful not to be the last player standing..... or do I?
The marketcap for SIM right now is something like 131950 HIVE, or 48k USD, while the game holds as near as I can tell around 110k USD in assets, between splinterlands assets, HIVE, USDC stables and ETH. Most of these assets are earning some sort of yield, extending out the runway even further.
SIM Power holdings is paying 40% apr, on 48k that's $19200 per year. This seems like a pretty solid runway, especially considering that I get outsized yield by out-playing most of the other players around the game, while admitting that there are not as many of these anymore as their once was.
So obviously it would be way better, and more fun, if we got new players in. I know there are more updates planned for the game, likely these will now have to wait for next year (and we did get a lot of updates this year in 2023).
But this is not a zero-sum game. This is not magic internet money, we are competing for drips from a fund of assets, which is, after all these years, still pretty well capitalized. This type of numbers-based game is right up my alley, and I have enough skin in the game to keep me paying attention - perhaps this is to my advantage.
So if you are interested in getting some limited edition cards for your city at pretty good prices, take a look at the market. The cool thing about the game market, while it may be slow, is that the 5% market fee in SIM is 'burned' back into the game. Its one of the many SIM sinks that I never realized. There are more updates coming in 2024, including perhaps the elusive 4th edition. Are we going to space? Only time will tell.