With the over-eating slowly coming to an end, it's time for one last Play2Earn Report for the year. 2020 has been a wild ride for me. It terms of actual Play2Earn, though, it was a great year with many good things coming together for me. Since this is going to be my last report of the year, I want to change things up a bit. Instead of only looking at the last week like I usually do, I'll take a look back at my year in each respective game. Hopefully, next year's Christmas, I'll be able to come back to that article and compare how things progressed in year 2 of the Play2Earn Report.
Before I go over my different games, though, let's first have a look at the tokens I'm holding:
| Token | Amount | Increase |
|---|---|---|
| Hive | 6,154 | 32 |
| LEO | 5,059 | 29 |
| LBI | 2,000 | 313 |
| SPT | 34,949 | 7,751 |
Just yesterday, I've converted my last LEO to LBI-tokens, so I'm now sitting at a comfortable 2,000 tokens stashed. Sadly, YIELDBONDA is not getting funded, so I'll use the 500$ coming back from that project to buy another 2,000 LBI. In the end, I'll have 4,000 LBI in my Wallet and I feel like that's a good number to work with. So from now on, my LEO is probably going to be staked again, time to get closer to 10,000 LEO there.
Hive is still only fueled by the 50% of the author rewards paid out in Hive Power. Everything else is going to other projects. By now, I have 5,800 Hive power delegated to 
Now let's take a look at my different games:
Splinterlands
Splinterlands was actually the second blockchain game that I've ever played. I had stumbles across Gods Unchained and was really in love with the whole Play2Earn concept, so I was looking around Google for other games. At first, I was really underwhelmed by Splinterlands. It took several rounds of playing it on and off until I realized it's huge potential but also what a fun game it actually was.
From these humble beginnings, the game has become one of my biggest investments in the blockchain world. I bought a region in their first land presale but also bought a lot of key cards to be able to compete in Champion I. I have to admit, when they introduced the Power Rating System, I was not a big fan. But in hindsight, it was what actually made me get more involved with the game. Without it, I would still be passively milking the rewards pool. When I bought the region, I did so through a second account that was referred through me. That way, I had another 375$ in Splinterlands credits to spend, allowing me to get competitive in 5 of 6 shards. I'm still ignoring Water up until today and I sometimes suffer a bit for it. One of my goals for 2021 will be to slowly improve in that area as well.
Other than that, I'll be heavily stocking up on Summoners. I did an article to explain my reasoning behind it and I stand by it. Talking numbers, I'm earning between 40,000 and 50,000 DEC from ranked play and tournament rewards per season, so that's about 80,000 - 10,000 DEC per month or about 60$-80$. Not bad for playing a game... Add in the passive income from renting out my cards and I can say I'm really happy with the way things are going here.
If any of the games I play manage to get to the mainstream next year, I'm quite certain it will be Splinterlands. It honestly might still be too early for this, but if they keep doing what they do, this game is going to be around for a long time and should earn me a lot of rewards.
eXode
The game that brought me to Hive in the first place. I certainly had hoped to see a faster development and in many other cases, I would have already given up on the game. For eXode, that's different though. I'd obviously would have loved to play Colonization back in autumn, but sometimes good things take a little longer than what you'd expect. The First Evacuation Challenge was already pretty cool and hopefully we'll see more of that and also a first glimpse of Colonization in January and February.
I've invested a little over 2,000$ into the game and so far, I did not regret doing so. I managed to sell some of my contract drops every now and then, but all things considered, earnings should probably start to improve only once Colonization is in and we have a persistent game with regular rewards and everything. Hopefully, this won't be too far off now.
Rising Star
Rising Star was one of the first games I picked up after I had joined Hive. It still was in early Alpha when I started to play it and that gave my the unique chance to grow with a game right from the beginning. I played (and play) missions like a mad man, slowly but steadily increasing my fans. During late summer, I was making more than 100 Hive each week with the game, those were pretty fun times. Then again, this obviously was not sustainable long term. Ever since, Rising Star has seen many changes to it's economy and to how rewards are given out. There were times where I wasn't sure whether it would succeed in transforming into a long term viable game or not. With the introduction of the rewards pool, though, I feel like we are perfectly on track again - 2021 is going to be huge for Rising Star!
I've already bought a first 12-pack from the store and I'm in the process of saving up to the 100,000 Starbits mark again right now. I was a little unlucky with my first 12 packs as I didn't find a single Epic or Legendary but they still contained a lot of cards I did not own yet. Right now, I'm sitting at #47 for the rewards pool and for all I'm concerned, it can only go up from there.
The Starbits price also is slowly recovering, right now we see a massive buy wall at 3.5 Hive per 10,000 Starbits. At the same time, there are no more super cheap NFTs on the market, anything below 500 Starbits has been bought up. To me, that's clearly a sign for a healthy upwards trend, Rising Star certainly is back on track!
Cryptobrewmaster
Another game I've been playing from day 1, Cryptobrewmaster certainly is something special to me. I love that they don't require a Hive account in order to start playing. This allowed me to bring a lot of players from outside of Hive to the game. Right now, I'm looking at a totally crazy number of 304 players that I have referred to the game!
I'm also faithfully holding on to my CBM tokens. Right now, I'm sitting at 18,112 CBM which places me at #5 of the game's rich list. Thanks to the Sunday Wealthy Brewer event, this also means that I receive weekly rewards in the form of new ingredients. It took some time for the game to really take off, but by now, I feel like it has the most interesting economy of all blockchain games that I'm aware of.
I'm really looking forward to all the new stuff coming to the game in the coming months. From what I can tell, the developer has ideas for years to come. Also, the concept of connecting players of the game with real world breweries advertising through the game is really intriguing. If this ever takes off, we should see many good things happening to the game.
dCity
I've been late to the party on that one. dCity was one of the games that I knew existed but for what ever reasons never really picked up. In hindsight, this certainly has been a mistake. But alas, there's no changing that now. Ever since I started to play it, I've been progressing rather well. I'm sitting at #351 in the rewards pool right now and I'm slowly climbing the ranks there, hoping to eventually reach the top 300 so I would advance to the next rewards level.
For now, I'm only reinvesting the SIM I get as a daily income while the Hive was used for other endeavors - namely buying more LBI. My goal is to get to the top 300 in January, so if I find that that's not possible without spending some more Hive, I might change that behavior again. For now, though, I'll keep investing the Hive from the rewards pool elsewhere.
Conclusion
And these were the games I'm actively playing right now. There were some other games lost on the way and I might do an article about why I quit playing these in the coming days because I feel like it's important to also take a look at what is not working (in my opinion) and try to learn from these shortcomings. With Unsung Hero and Ocean Planet right around the corner, there are also two new contenders for the Play2Earn report. Both look extremely promising in my opinion and I can't wait to give them a shot.
And that's all from me today. I want to thank everybody that has been following my articles, who left a comment or interacted with me in any other way. When I started my first Play2Earn report, it really was just an experiment to see if there's an audience for that kind of content. A few months later, I can say - there certainly is! I had people reference my articles in their comments and articles. People told me they did join this or that game because I recommended it. It's really a humbling experience for me and I greatly enjoy it. Thank you all so much and see you next year with many more Play2Earn reports to come!