Splinterlands opened the gates as a kickstarter project.
Kickstarter is a platform that allows a creator to find buyers for a product before creating it.
To help get the buyers excited, creators usually offer all sorts of exclusive perks which get better the more you buy. They are to incentivize people to spend way more money than they usually would on similar products and often way more than they need to.
The perks usually double as ways to make you feel special. Like you're an important part of the creators story.
Splinterlands was a great fit for this way of selling because they could sell you a nearly unlimited amount of card packs and just keep offering you perks for buying more than anyone else.
Buy more packs and we will give you even more packs!
We'll let you design a card!
Get this card that will never be released again!
Buy this many packs and we'll make sure you get a copy of every card we've ever made.
Buy this many packs and forever be in our special mavericks club.
All stuff that costs them nothing but makes you feel special and gets you to spend more. And hey, there's certainly nothing wrong with a business trying to get their customers to want to spend more with them. It's just that up to this point they've never had to think much further than sell more cards to make more money. I mean before the rental market there wasn't much of a complex economy to worry about balancing.
Why am I talking about this?
The model for Splinterlands has always been to sell as many packs as possible without caring about the capacity to use those cards in game.
Buy MOAR packs, get MOAR perks.
This was fine when those cards just sat in whale accounts like Magic The Gathering cards sitting in Mama's closet. They didn't affect the market or the game just by existing.
But the rental market changed all that by allowing them to sit in those whale accounts while also being able to be used by others.
If you were here during the ramp of new players last summer, you remember the time when all the new players were bidding up cards and it seemed like there just weren't enough cards to go around. Everyone said we needed MOAR cards. Cheaper cards. We needed collapsing asset prices or new people wouldn't want to play.
Now I'm sure you all see why I was screaming the opposite but at the time I was a lone voice. The consensus was we needed so much more inventory.
I'd gone to some whale accounts and saw that they had hundreds and sometimes thousands of copies of all sorts of cards we thought were scarce and they just hadn't bothered to put them on the rental market yet.
But they were starting to. I'd see 20 more cards enter the rental market and prices would drop by 30 or 40% on that card. Then I'd go to the account where those new 20 cards came from and see that they were sitting on sometimes thousands more copies of that card.
There was so much pre-CL inventory sitting around that had just a few of these accounts decided to go all in on the rental market or decided to just sell everything the game would have gone from undersupplied to drowning in inventory.
When I saw that is when I started sounding the alarm that we didn't need CL at all but if they were going to do it, CL should be a small run. They couldn't put out these big, heavy pack drops anymore if they wanted player retention. The rental market just wouldn't allow it.
My biggest fear for the game was that they would do something crazy like 10x Untamed because of the player growth.
And what did they do?
After putting out a monster sized run of rewards cards that we are currently only half way through and are so abundant they've pushed the price of CP down to nothing, they came out with their biggest kickstarter style card pack sale of all time.
15 million packs.
75 million cards.
10x Untamed.
Prices collapsed. People lost interest in a game with collapsing prices. Tire kickers came in and immediately walked back out. Whales sold, DEC and SPS fell 95% from their highs and the card market cap, even with thousands of new cards being added daily, does nothing but fall.
It was all blamed on crypto even though even on crypto's good days/weeks, Splinterlands just kept falling.
Want to know the crazy thing? I doubt 1/3 of the total Chaos Legion packs have been opened yet and we've already seen this much destruction of value.
Want to know the other crazy thing? Those whales, are still sitting on probably a million pre-CL cards that haven't entered the rental or sales market yet but still could at any time.
Just recently we saw an influx of Furious Chickens hit the rental market from some of these accounts. The chicken is the most played card in every league. There are currently 6200 chickens of different levels sitting on the rental market on unused. There are only 27k chickens in the game.
You can rent a chicken right now for $0.20 for an ENTIRE YEAR right now.
If we can't absorb 27k chickens, the rest of these cards are never going to be absorbed.
So many accounts that look like this:
This is playable cards you're looking at, not total owned. These are cards just sitting dormant from just one of many accounts that look like this.
Notice, these aren't CL cards or new rewards cards we know we have an abundance of. These are Alphas, betas, promos, and untamed. And these are the people who are also sitting on thousands of unopened packs from these releases.
So this is all still here and if you just watched the Chaos Legion launch you can see they haven't moved on from the old kickstarter model of sell as much as they can to a few people with perks and prizes. They just aren't using the actual kickstarter platform any longer.
Every 50 packs got you a Dr. Blight which will never be released again.
Be a top 6 buyer and create your own legendary summoner.
Bonus packs for buying packs in the presale.
Titles for buying a certain amount of packs.
Same game plan that crated all the oversupply from past releases, now supersized.
And what does this lead to? A month of hype over the new pack coming which is accompanied by a massive sell off of every other card. So not really the hype you want.
Then one day of craziness where people open a couple million packs and by the end of the day every one of the new cards is available to buy or rent out at every level and in abundance. Nothing new coming down the pike except the airdropped cards which again is part of a system to encourage a few people to buy a whole bunch of packs.
Then the rest of the year of everyone knows what the cards are. There's no scarcity in any of them and they are so cheap that most people will tell you not to bother buying packs. Just get whatever card you want from the secondary.
Then every pack opened is just more pressure on the market while introducing nothing new to the game.
How fun!
Let me have a go at this pack selling thing. Tell me if this is better.
It's Oct/Nov 2021 and Chaos Legion is coming. The lore is all Splinters are on journeys from their homes to a central location to battle or invade or whatever CL did in the lore. Players are excited. These monsters are going to change everything!
The Devs come out and say vouchers are coming.
To get vouchers there are two qualifications:
You need to have at least 50 SPS staked.
You need to have completed 25 of the last 30 days daily quests.
Everyone who meets those two qualifications will receive one guaranteed voucher.
If you miss either of those you get no vouchers.
After everyone gets one voucher, the rest of the vouchers get distributed just as they do now based on your SPS stake in a daily airdrop.
Two changes though with the way vouchers are issued through this launch and forever:
Every account with the small SPS requirement staked and an average of 25 out of the 30 days of completing the daily quests gets one voucher on the 1st of each month forever. These come out of the same pool as the daily airdrops.
To be included in the SPS dependent daily voucher airdrop we know and love today, the account must meet the minimum activity level of 25/30 daily quests completed. This is a rolling average.
These changes do three things:
They encourage many accounts to do at least some SPS staking. 400k accounts by 50 SPS is 20 million SPS staked. Of course this average requirement should go up slowly as the supply increases. By now we might be up to 200 SPS staked (about $16 worth). This means a little bit of buying pressure always on SPS and for all the right reasons. No exponential trick math or "flywheels".
They let small but dedicated players be included in everything. Rewarding playing the GAME instead of just being an investor. When people feel included they tell others, they engage more, and they invest more. <--- I bolded that to get @aggroed all tingly.
It encourages more investors like myself to take some cards off the market and use them to play. This immediately creates more demand for cards, more stable rental prices, and more engagement with the game. I stopped playing because I don't need another Venari Heatsmith. But take away my voucher drop and I'm motivated.
Back to this drop though...
Chaos Legion is coming and suddenly every real player with even a small SPS investment gets at least one voucher instead of the mess where small dedicated players had to buy vouchers from whales for $20 for a 1 in 50 chance of a Dr. Blight.
The drop
In January, the first team arrives to battle. It's Kelya Frendul and her team of 15 weird fish plus 2 of the 12 neutral monsters. That's right. They release just the 16 water cards and 2 neutrals. Not all of Chaos Legion.
And you can buy them by picking up one or more of the one-million (not 15 million) Chaos Legion Water packs.
Each pack has 4 cards (not 5) and sells for $10 + 1 voucher (not $4).
All packs forever need a voucher.
Now, there's one more big change:
The packs don't go on the open market. At least not yet.
Instead, one week before release voucher holders can put in an order for as many packs as they want up to the amount of vouchers they own. There is no guarantee all their orders will be filled though.
The day before the release there's a program that runs which fills orders one by one until packs run out or orders run out.
So when the program starts out, everyone with an order for any amount of packs has an open transaction going with the program. The program now visits each account once. It checks that the account has the funds and voucher for one pack. If it doesn't the program closes the transaction with that account. If it does, the program transacts exactly one pack to every eligible account. It then checks for order quantity. Anyone who ordered just one pack now has 1 of 1 packs they ordered delivered so the program closes the transaction with that account. If an account has more than one pack on order, the transaction stays open for round 2.
Next the programs runs through to all still open transactions and it again checks for the funds and voucher for a second pack and transacts the second pack. If the funds or vouchers aren't there it closes the transaction. Likewise anyone who only ordered two now has their two packs and their transaction is closed.
Then the programs does the check again on any accounts that are still opened. The program continues running this loop until all packs are sold out or all orders are filled. WHichever comes first.
So if I ordered 10 packs, I'll only get all 10 if there are still packs left by the time me and everyone else got their 1-9 orders filled.
If all the orders manage to get filled and there are still packs left over, they get released to the open market for $20 per pack plus voucher.
What this does is it spreads the packs out. All players feel like they have a chance to get some packs. They get to participate. They get something of value. And if at the end someone has an order for 1000 packs in and there are enough packs left after others have stopped buying, they can buy those 1000 packs.
The wider spread assets are the better. The more concentrated ownership is of anything, the worse off the ecosystem.
But this has another benefit.
Instead of every card getting hundreds of maxed out copies hitting the market within a few minutes of the first pack opening, it would actually be a real challenge to get a maxed out deck. People would actually have to hunt these cards down. Maybe only a few hundred players would ever have some cards maxed out. It would be a big deal and it would take everyone a while to unlock the full power of these cards. Which means they would remain fun and unpracticed at the highest levels for longer. People might fear playing against those few players who've unlocked these new cards full power.
And while people are chasing down those cards and learning how to play them and play against them, we're two months away from the next release.
That's right. The hype train continues because in March, Fire gets in and we do the exact same thing in that release. Another one million packs, 4 million cards, $10 million for the devs to develop the game with.
As we know, there are 6 splinters and 12 months in the year, so while people are learning their water and fire cards and scrambling to max things out, here comes May and the next Splinter is released.
Maybe its Life and that's your favorite so you've been saving your vouchers since November to really invest heavily there. You can's shut up about it actually because you're excited.
Every single time a drop comes, there's new gameplay. Not a single airdropped card because we sold a million new packs but 18 new cards including two new neutrals. All year the game is changing and evolving as the team you just figured out how to use now has new competition from the new splinter.
What about money for the dev team?
Each drop makes the Dev team $10 million if it sells out immediately. There are 6 splinters which means they will make $60 million. This is exactly what 15 million packs at $4 made them, if they could actually sell the last 6.5 million packs.
Actually they made less than that because they gave out a few hundred thousand packs as bonuses for buying up front. We don't want to encourage concentration of assets though so we don't do that. We want many people to buy a few packs so the economy is healthy.
Also, anything that doesn't sell goes back on the market for $20 so any $20 packs that sell obviously increase the money the devs make. So they should clear more money to fund development than they did with CL.
They'd also get a year of hype instead of being stuck in the mud by February. They'd have a predictable flow of income as most packs would sell out pretty quickly rather than a burst and then a trickle. The average price per card released would be $2.50 which would increase the perceived value of all cards existing already. It would be way more fun. And the most important part, it would release a total of 24 million cards into the economy instead of the more than 75 million their version of CL released.
You could do 3 years worth of packs for the economic supply cost of 1.
Two more advantages worth mentioning here. Rather than having 100+ cards coming out all at once, with 18 you could really zoom in on several for every release and work on the lore. Get people excited about the story of multiple characters before they come out.
Also they would actually have more time to play test the cards. Something that barely happened at all in the lower levels of the real CL launch. They are currently trying to incentivize using old cards but try winning with them in bronze. The old cards don't stand up.
So what do you think?
So that's it, that's the idea. Charge a larger but still reasonable amount. Put out fewer cards. Spread the releases. Sell to a wider audience while respecting the voucher system and encouraging playing the game and SPS buying and staking by hundreds of thousands of people who get to stay entertained all year.
Or you know, incentivize 6 people to buy 50k packs each so they can flood the market and take all the rewards and then watch the market drown for a year while they're forced to keep coming out with MOAR cards and mini packs so people don't get bored. Whichever really. Either is fine and I'm sure the team will choose to do the same thing again anyway.
But just know, there's a better way. There are probably 100 better ways in fact. This is just the one I came up with. Maybe yours is better than mine. If it is, let's get the devs attention and let them know we have ideas for how this can be done in a more sustainable way.
(This used to be $200k.)
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