Agg threw the mavs chat into a tizzy this morning with an announcement that a major movie studio wants to do a pack sale in Splinterlands.
He threw out some numbers, but those are just picked out of the air. So I don't want to focus too much on that.
What I do want to do is go through some of my initial thoughts.
My very first thought is that so much can go wrong when doing deals with large companies. Even after getting a "yes" from the studio, the whole thing could fall apart for any number of reasons.
But let's assume the deal happens, the movie is made, and the movie is released.
The Question: Will such a promotion bring in new people to Splinterlands?
Everything rests on the answer to The Question.
The way I see it, there are 3 possibilities:
1, No significant demand from the movie audience for these characters in a blockchain (or any) game.
2, Significant demand from the movie audience. The general impact a movie has is going to be short-lived. Maybe 3-4 weeks before it dies down to a fraction of its early hype. In this scenario Splinterlands would do great to make hay while the sun shines as it were.
3, Significant demand from a repeating intellectual property set. This would be the best scenario where a series of movies are released (think Marvel or DC) based on the same character set, each tied into these new cards.
The challenge, of course, is we don't know which scenario will play out ahead of time.
Let's assume the deal moves forward and a new movie set of cards is produced. Cards in modern will definitely be diluted in utility value. It's likely that this will impact card prices and rental values as well.
That will be offset to some degree by new blood coming into the ecosystem. Once they are in with the movie cards, some fraction will create fresh demand for everything else we have. We just don't know how big that fraction is.
So... dilution vs new demand.
My thought is to have a tiered release to balance these two.
Let's say the total potential max is 2 million packs. Ideally, Splinterlands would be able to tell how many sales are coming from new users how many are coming from existing players.
Recycling existing users doesn't really get us anywhere. We know that the existing base can swing some big numbers around like we saw with the Chaos Legion holiday sale. So there would need to be some kind of threshold system for judging how much new demand is being brought in.
Similar to how they have talked about Rebellion being launched with a built-in burn schedule, this movie set should prevent/burn packs if demand from new users is not sufficient to balance out the dilution aspect.
What those threshold values might be would be open for debate. Maybe tier 1 would be 250k packs from new users within 2 weeks of release - but this is also just picked out of the air. Expectations will depend on how big a movie it is. A summer blockbuster will have more action than a mid-October release.
Regardless, tiers would be picked before release to judge whether the venture is a success or failure. If it's a success, then great, keep selling and bringing in new people. If it's a failure (measured at each tier), burn the remaining supply to prevent additional dilution.
Anyhow, that's what makes sense to me.