In celebration of the coming Bitcoin Halving Splinterlands is having their own little celebration of the event. For every 5 packs of their current edition sold they add a copy of an exclusive promo card called Halfling Alchemist. This card is limited to a total of 12,000 copies with 10,000 copies given out for buying packs and 2,000 copies airdropped to random players actively playing during the event.
The event started just yesterday and Splinterlands already managed to sell 30,000 booster packs during those first 24 hours. Now the exact price of a pack varies depending on how many you buy and what currency you choose to pay in. If you pay with fiat though the price is 2$ per booster. This means that Splinterlands managed to make 60,000$ just from selling booster packs in a single day. To put this number into some context, the last kickstarter that Splinterlands held managed to raise a total of 202,159$ over the course of a whole month. While both can't be compared directly this helps to illustrate what a huge success this has been for them.
I've made an article detailing how their economy is build a while ago and have been following the project more closely every since. I have to admit that I am more and more impressed by the way they created their ingame economy and how they (at least so far) managed to create real value for both their players and their collectors. They have many small systems in place that really help to not only protect the value of their cards but to even make them worth more the longer you hold on to them. To illustrate we'll take a short look at how they make sure that Halfling Alchemist is going to be increasingly valuable over time.
Firstly, there are are never going to be more than 12,000 copies of the card in existence. This is already something that many developers get wrong. Many events in other trading card games basically create a near endless supply of promotion cards, allowing their players to endlessly grind out more cards until the event is finished. Having a limit and making it known to everybody already helps to preserve its value. Talking about the card itself, it's actually not only playable but a good to great card in the right deck. In other games you often receive fluff cards with fun to strange mechanics that don't actually fit into any competitive deck. Again, this is helping the card to retain its value. Since it's actually played competitively there's going to be demand by actual players and not only by collectors who happened to miss the event.
Those decisions help to make the card actually interesting to players. But there's also a system in place in case the card was not interesting (enough) to players. Every card in Splinterlands can be burned for a fixed amount of ingame currency. In the case of the Halfling Alchemist a single copy converts to 600 DEC or roughly 0.5$ so even if nobody was to ever buy a copy it could still be converted to either cash out or buy other cards with it. Since this option is available for every card there can never be more supply than there is demand. If any given card is worth less than its corresponding burn value than cards will get taken out of circulation until the price moves up.
Lastly, several copies of a card can be fused in order to create a stronger version of the card. There are several tiers of upgrades that both require more and more copies of the same card but also make it even stronger with every additional upgrade. The Halfling Alchemist can be upgraded a total of 5 times but you need 46 copies of the card to get there.
From a gaming point of view I'm not the biggest fan of that system as it's a Pay 2 Win mechanic where more money equals more power. From a investors point of view though this is brilliant. The more Halfling Alchemist receive upgrades the less copies there are available in general. With a total of 12.000 copies distributed there can only be 260 fully upgraded Halfling Alchemists in existence ever. Consequently, the later you are to the party the more you'll have to pay for your Alchemist. In effect as long as there is interest in the card prizes can only go up.
The Splinterlands team still has a lot of plans for the game and even for more games using the same assets so I'm rather confident that we'll see a steady growth at least for some more years. Because of this I feel like investing in some of their cards might be a good idea even if you're not interested in playing the game.
So, what do you guys think about Splinterlands? Do you play yourself? Are you investing into its economy?
As always, thank you all for reading and see you next time.