Why do you play Splinterlands?
Earlier this week I wrote an article about Splinterlands vs bots in which I mentioned that I started playing Splinterlands again: article
I thought maybe it's a good idea to mention why I am (again) playing Splinterlands. Besides talking about myself, I'm also interested Why do you play Splinterlands or why not?
It all began in December 2021, I was a bit bored and was looking for a new game to play on my laptop. After googling a bit, I saw the term play2earn in my google results. I didn't know it at that time but it seemed awesome, earning money while playing games instead of spending money on those games. Soon I learned that play2earn means that you can indeed earn some money to play the games. How does it work? While playing those games, you can earn NFT's of those games. These NFT's can be traded and sold for cryptocurrencies which could be swapped for fiat if you would like to.
Awesome community
I am already playing videogames for about 20 years. Always there is some kind of community involved: being it the other players, or forums where you look for information or marketplaces to trade or..., What I found out about the Splinterlands community from day 1, they are really helpfull. On day 1, as I was searching for information, I looked around a bit at Twitch, where I found the following streamer, 
Not only was she hosting a lot of giveaways through her streams, also the other people in her stream were really helpfull and even generous. I received some dec, some delegations and even received some cards. When I compare it to other 'classic' games, like COD / CSGO / LOL / ..., there I usually encountered a lot of toxic people in the community.
Team behind Splinterlands
After nearly two years of looking around in cryptoprojects, one thing I learned is that the team behind a project is very important. This may seem logic to everyone, but still it is often overlooked in my opinion. The Splinterlands team is working hard to deliver innovation and value addition to the community. In the beginning, I was mainly focused on getting as many cards as possible. Nowadays, I'm also looking into other assets, including the tokens.
Earning money
As I stated in the beginning, I tumbled upon play2earn games and intially I thought I could make a decent amount of money with them. Reality kicked in rather soon than late and although Splinterlands is free2play, you would rather want to invest into the spellbook to start collecting cards. Besides the spellbook, if you want to make a significant amount of money, you'll have to invest something into the game. As always: money makes money, which is also applicable to Splinterlands. In my first weeks, I played Splinterlands without investing anything into it (besides the spellbook), after a few months, my account was worth about 50USD, which wasn't that bad to play a game I think. This was ofcourse nothing when compared to whales, but still I was happy with this 'free money'.
Ownership of the assets
As you can see in above image, at the moment of writing, I own 111 different, unique Splinterlands cards. In total, I have 1062 cards. Since they are all NFT's, they can be used for other things aswell. For example, recently I found out about https://splinterforge.io/#/ . This is a game which is not linked to Splinterlands (the company) but which uses the cards of Splinterlands. I think this is awesome that the assets of one game, could be used in a totally different game.
Introduction to crypto
This one maybe isn't a real reason why I play Splinterlands, but see it as a 'bonus' ^^ For me, Splinterlands was really my introduction to play2earn games, NFT's and more in general cryptocurrencies. Before I got into the world of Splinterlands, cryptocurrencies were a bit vague for me and I definitely wouldn't invest in them. Now, 1 year later I'm setting my 'first' small steps in this wonderfull technology. Splinterlands was as said my first play2earn game, but afterwards I discovered some others aswell. Will probably make another article about the games I'm playing at the moment. ;)
To conclude, I'm interested in: why are you playing Splinterlands (or why not)? So feel free to react in the comments!
As always, thanks for reading!
If you didn't play Splinterlands yet, feel free to join: https://splinterlands.com?ref=stekene