Can Splinterlands still attract new players in 2024?

I started playing Splinterlands in 2021 at the height of play to earn craze. Back then, I was playing several P2E games like Axie, Alien Worlds, RPlanet and a lot more. Whenever I’d consider playing a new game, my first question was, “How much do I need to invest?” and “How much will I earn?” I didn’t care much if the game was fun, if fun was my priority then I’d play console or PC games. For Splinterlands the investment was $10 for the spellbook and you can start, use the starter deck and play in Bronze League. I remember earning around $2 daily from DEC alone. I’d use my earnings to rent and buy cards that were not in the starter deck like Mylor. Later on I even created several accounts.

However, the rewards have decreased some months after Chaos Legion was released. The SPS reward is less than the DEC earnings before and NFT cards have been stopped. One of the reasons is inflation brought about by thousands of bots extracting rewards from the game and selling cards cheaply in the market. For example, Djinn Oceanus was once priced at $60 and Wavesmith at $5 now their prices are a fraction of the trading price when they were first released. This has caused some players to lose interest in the game.

Splinterlands need new players in order to be sustainable. The question is how can it attract new players to the game. There are talks of marketing efforts and new player experience to be rolled out by the team. However is this enough to get new players?

In my opinion, the factors still remain the same for a P2E player when considering a game. 1) How much is the capital. 2) How long is the ROI.

In the first question, How much capital is needed to play and earn? Aside from the $10 spellbook, a player needs to rent a deck (I won’t recommend buying because it will be around $500 for a decent deck) and also rent SPS. I’d rent 20K SPS which will cost around 80 DEC or 4.5 SPS a day. A Silver deck rental is around 160 DEC per day or 9 SPS.

In the second question, How much will I earn? For me, I’m using a gold deck and I earn around 30 SPS or 60 cents per day in Silver League. Subtracting the SPS cost from rentals the net SPS earnings will be around 17 SPS or 34 cents per day. I’m not sure if a new player will be convinced to start the game with these earnings. Maybe my estimates are too low since I only play in Silver. However, Bronze or Silver Leagues are the sweet spot for new players.

Another factor that a potential player will consider are other games. Splinterlands is not the only TCG. There’s also Gods Unchained and the new game, Parallel. I don’t have time to play the other two games at the moment but some Splinterlands youtubers like AfterSound and Cryptmancer are already playing Parallel.

Do you think Splinterlands can attract new players? What are your suggestions to do so? Comment down below!