Hopefully that title didn’t trigger you, but if it did then I apologise. I am still long term bullish on Splinterlands – I have come to view it as a pretty impressive game in its own right and the fact that it is blockchain based with trade-able NFTs puts it front and centre of the blockchain gaming revolution that I’ve been expecting will explode over the coming years. But as with anything crypto-related there are ups and downs and I’m just calling it how I see it – Splinterlands is having a bit of a down cycle at the moment.
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The reason why? Well I can only speculate but I think that the Chaos Legion launch has flooded the asset market a little bit and needs some time for the existing player base to absorb all those extra cards. The metagame is currently evolving as players figure out what new cards they want to use and what old ones maybe aren’t so unique or valuable any more. For any hard core gamer this is still a pretty exciting time and it’s important for games not to stagnate. As such, I do applaud the game developers so don’t take this post as criticism, but cold hard analysis is unemotional so we need to take the rose coloured glasses off.
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The first thing I wanted to point out is that the general sale for Chaos Legion Packs is underway and while 6.5 million packs have been sold already, there is still almost 8.5 million still to hit the market. This is probably good news as with any new release you have initial hype and a lot of existing players diving in to scoop up those early packs….and we’ve seen that phase play out. Now we have a slower grind while the remaining 8.5 million sell at a more gradual pace. Players who want to bolster their decks are likely going to be a lot better off buying cards directly off the market for a while while all that extra card supply gets soaked up. That means at the moment those Chaos Legion cards are probably selling cheap on the open market and if they haven’t bottomed out yet they probably aren’t far off. I wouldn’t expect too many Chaos Legion Packs to sell until individual card prices that come out of those packs start to recover a bit.
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The next thing I wanted to look at is the SPS token price. It’s probably down more than 80% from its peaks in September 2021 and still looks to be trending down. I’ve been selling off my SPS airdrops regularly up until this point but it’s starting to get to that point where I am getting comfortable that the hype has well and truly worn off. While I’m not yet a buyer of SPS, I’ve started staking my airdropped SPS as once again – I think the bottom is probably not too far off and I’ll be looking for signs of a bottom over the next few months before starting to accumulate.
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Finally I wanted to mention the rental market briefly. I haven’t been renting cards out for long and statistics for the rental market can be harder to find, but it looks to be a little bit depressed at the moment also. Some of the new Chaos cards seem to be getting a decent APR on the rental market – presumably as existing players like to “try before they buy” as that would be smart while the new metagame takes shape. But many of the older cards APR are dropping below the 12% that can be earned just by putting Hive Backed Dollars (HBD) into Savings so that might also create some selling pressure on those older cards in the short term.
Overall I am still bullish on Splinterlands, but I’m a realist and the market needs some time to digest the recent supply boom and consolidate a little bit before it can go forward again. It’s a good time to be patient and also to scoop up those bargains at the low prices, so that’s what I’m trying to do. Good luck to you if you’re in the market for anything Splinterlands related!