One Year Review - Is Splinterlands Really Play2Earn?

One year ago, I chanced upon Splinterlands while reading up about play-to-earn crypto games. I signed up on 25 Sep 2021 and found the game interesting during the tutorial, so I purchased the spellbook the next day on 26 Sep 2021. At that time, such crypto games were a relatively new concept to me but I thought why not give it a shot and explore this space, hopefully learn some new stuff as well.

Screenshot from my email on 26 Sep 2021

Time flies and it has been one full year since I started playing Splinterlands. The game is so addictive and I can proudly say that I have played this game every single day for the past 365 days because there's the daily mission/chest to collect. (The format has changed drastically since when I started though, but the daily chests remain.)

Throughout the past year, there were both happy moments and frustrating moments. My most memorable moment would be 15 Nov 2021. About every two weeks, we get to open chests during End Of Season (EOS) and on this day, I ended on Silver 3 and had 12 EOS chests to open. Being a new player who was barely surviving in Bronze leagues, I didn't realise how awesome this set of rewards was until much much later.

Screenshot from one of my Discord chats on 15 Nov 2021

Another highlight for me was finishing 4th out of 253 players in one of the tournaments. I play tournaments occasionally when time permits and I must admit I am not quite the expert player, so my results are mostly around average or slightly above average. But as the saying goes, practice makes perfect, and I somehow managed to finish 4th out of 253 players in this one. Because such results were so rare, I was extremely proud of myself and it was a morale booster for me.

I also made a lot of friends, both on Discord chat groups and Hive, and looking back, it was so much fun to play Splinterlands with like-minded individuals. We celebrated our achievements together, complained about our bad luck in chest rewards together too, and before I knew it, I was fighting alongside with them in guild brawls. Without these friends, it would have been pretty boring to play this game alone everyday.

I am also grateful to so many helpful people in the community, who would not hesitate to help newbies like me when I first started. Be it cards giveaways, card delegations, free DEC, etc.

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I was also particularly excited when Splinterlands listed SPS on Crypto.com earlier this year. Being an existing Crypto.com user, it provided a lot of convenience and ease of access to move the crypto tokens between Hive and fiat. I remembered they also ran a promotion and I managed to earn some free SPS tokens from it! So in a way, I have more than gotten back the cost of the my spellbook. :)

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Onto the economical/financial aspect of the game, this pie chart shows the breakdown of the assets that I have accumulated over 1 year. If you prefer to look at the individual amounts, there's the table below as well.

Item	Amount	Price in USD	Value in USD	%
Tokens
SPS	1,438	0.067	96.35	30.3%
DEC	48,057	0.0007068	33.97	10.7%
VOUCHER	9.633	0.425	4.09	1.3%
Packs
CHAOS	30	2.05	61.50	19.3%
RIFT	2	3.58	7.16	2.3%
Cards
Non-Gladius	1,055 (1,190 BCX)		113.00	35.5%
Gladius	46 (70 BCX)		1.99	0.6%
Total			318.05	100%

In summary, based on the values of the tokens, packs and cards at the time of writing, I have accumulated a total of USD 318.05 of Splinterlands assets from over 700 hours (estimating about 2 hours per day x 365 days).

So back to the question in my title, is Splinterlands really play-to-earn?

While it's a "Yes" because one does earn something from it, but I think one also has to be realistic to recognise that with such earning rates, this can't possibly replace a full time job, at least based on my experience. So for me, I think it's more of a game to have fun and play with friends, and the earnings are more of a bonus and it's best not to have high expectations (e.g. striking of a windfall).

That said, I think the second year will be easier or perhaps more "profitable" since I am more familiar with the gameplay. Also, I am starting off with some assets (compared to when I was starting from scratch right at the beginning) which means there's the ongoing APR/rental even if I don't do anything. But with all the endless changes in the Splinterlands game, and the volatility in the crypto markets, I guess we will never know.

Finally, to everyone who is reading this post and has crossed paths with me within the game, thanks so much for being part of my Splinterlands journey!

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If you are interested to sign up to play Splinterlands, my referral link is here.