A Pound of Flesh

We are getting to the end of the season for Splinterlands, with a little over 8 hours left. I stopped playing a couple days ago though, as I was struggling to do the quests and even more so, reach the next League milestone -though for the first time ever, I made it into Diamond 1. I actually made it half way to Champion III, but got knocked back to mid-DII and had to play back up again.

One thing I liked this season was getting to play a couple rounds against two of my Splinterlands gurus, @abh12345 and @azircon - I lost all of them - but still, it was a bit of fun. As I have said previously, it is enjoyable playing against names I know, more than unfamiliars, plus we are able to have a laugh about it (mostly at my expense) after.

"My expense" has been enormous into Splinterlands so far and I am looking to extend it further during the open sale with packs and then, picking up odd cards that I need. I have actually bought a few more lately, since the price has been "down" (still high) that I think I am missing, but it is an endless mission - I guess that is the point.

There was an announcement last night about the future of SPS and that is going to add an interesting kink into the economy:

While the land economy details are still in the process of being developed and will be released as soon as they are available, one thing we can assure players of is that staking SPS tokens will feature HEAVILY into the land expansion in order to get the most out of your land resources.

Heavily.

I am not sure how heavy is "heavy", but I only have 8 PLOTs of LAND, so unsure how much I am going to have to have in order to get the most out of my land resources. I currently have a "measly" 40,000 staked, which would give me around 5000 per PLOT, but is this going to be enough? No idea, but the value of SPS is currently gurgling around the 20 cent mark (dropped under 18 for a bit) and I think there are many people wondering if it is all going to be worth it.

This is a good thing for investors however, as it is the old "buy when there's blood in the streets" quote, and I qualify for the rest of that quote too - "even if that blood is your own".

Normally I talk about having skin in the game, but at the moment, Splinterlands has dug more than skin deep and there are large chunks of flesh going in. Will I come out ahead? I hope so - but technically, I am not in a loss, even though I have sunk quite a bit in over the last half year, but if the values drop down not too far more, it might be getting sketchy.

However, I have faith that long term. the investment is looking sound and with the various expansions coming around LAND, which is exciting since we are moving into 2022, the year of usable NFTS. I really think that the narrative around this coming 12 months will be generally surrounding utility of crypto, where even the mainstream media will start reporting on blockchains and applications that provide investment potential, as well as some kind of practical usage. It has already started in the last few months with mentions of Axie Infinity, but this will ramp up fast, especially around the gaming industry.

I fully expect the large gaming companies to start putting serious development funding toward crypto games and this will ramp up the publicity around the industry enormously, taking it from "buy tokens and wait for moon" to, buy tokens and play with them while waiting for moon. The trouble with the large gaming companies could be that they are very top heavy already and need a lot of resources to maintain themselves.

While they are very good at extracting value from users, most of them have zero experience giving value back to them, and most of the money that is made comes through third-party sources, not from the gaming companies themselves. This means that they have to restructure their business model in order to cater for a lower return on their investment, something that is not easy to do. Then, they have to decide on which blockchains they are going to use, or if they will build one of their own - there are many complexities around this and pros and cons on all sides and, there will not be one model going forward.

What is interesting to consider, is that this actually enables more decentralization of the industry and will create all kinds of competition and gaps in the market on both the blockchains and the traditional industries. This means that there is going to be a growing amount of opportunity for everyone to participate, no matter what level they are willing to play.

While I would love it if there was only ever upside growth, these consolidation periods where people are umming and ahhing over what to do with many selling, is an opportunity for someone like me to get in a little deeper again, adding more flesh - risking the loss of an arm and a leg. Picking up a few cards here and there, staking a little more SPS, maybe even looking to see if another PLOT is on the cards.

Who knows...

Every decision made comes with a hit or miss opportunity and I am hoping that there are going to be more hits than misses that when the run up comes on the crypto gaming industry, Splinterlands is going to get copious amounts of support, shine more lights onto Hive blockchain opportunities, wake developers up to the HDF and bring all of us who have been investing in, some of the gains on the potential we know exists here.

The pound of flesh is searing on the grill.

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]