It's been a whiles since I did a dedicated article on Rising Star. After some fundamental changes to its ingame economy, the game had been struggling a bit these last weeks. As I had mentioned in one of my Play2Earn Reports, I had taken a bit of a back seat and have been monitoring the development for a while now. Just recently, the game announced the introduction of a rewards pool which will start to pay out daily rewards starting January 1st 2021. In my opinion, this might be exactly what the game needed and it certainly could be a game changer for Rising Star!
In this article, I will discuss what this new rewards pool is going to look like and why it was needed, detail the different pieces influencing your share of the reward, and finally explain why I believe this to be a huge step in the right direction.
Before I get into any detail regarding the rewards pool, let me first give you a short introduction to the game for those that have not heard of it yet. As always, if you already know the game, feel free to skip this part of the article and read on after the screenshot below.
Rising Star is an idle game running on the Hive blockchain. It's puts you in the shoes of a lowly busker with the aspiration to reach stardom some day. You start out by performing illegally in the streets or giving it your best on karaoke night. Eventually, you'll start to perform in bigger venues, form your own band and start touring the country.
All your band members, your instruments, but even your touring coach and your rehearsal room are represented by NFTs that can be traded freely with other players. Doing missions in the game awards you withRising Star's very own token - Starbits. Starbits can be used to buy either booster packs containing random cards or to buy specific cards from the market. Staribts are also traded at Hive-Enginge and if you check the history, there are quite some trades going on every day.
Up until now, the only way of earning a return on the game was by either selling Starbits or the game's NFTs for Hive or other tokens. This created a somewhat problematic loop for the games economy. People held on to the cards that helped them to generate more Starbits and tried to sell off all other cards and also (parts) of their Starbits for Hive. With more and more Starbits entering circulation, this became highly unsustainable and, despite some good effort made by the developer to counteract it, made the Starbits price plummet substantially.
The introduction of a rewards pool might very well serve to cure that issue in a lasting way. By having a separate pool of daily rewards, the token price becomes less important and holding on to NFTs becomes more interesting again. People should be more likely to reinvest the Starbits they earn in order to receive a bigger slice of the daily rewards cake. So what's the rewards pool going to look like?
Each day a set amount of Hive is sent out to the top ranking players in the rewards pool. For now, this amount is rather small but it should grow over time with parts of all earnings the game makes reinvested to improve the rewards pool. Since it's not active yet, the numbers above are only examples of what the pool will look like. The top ranking player will receive 5% of the total rewards pool with each following player receiving a little less down to #98 currently.
As you can see above, there are 4 factors influencing your standing in the ranking with a combined 70% coming directly from the amount of cards you own and another 20% from one of the stats found on your cards. Only 10% are coming from your actual activity in the game. This may seem odd at first, but it serves two purposes. Firstly, you are already rewarded in Starbits for playing the game, so it makes sense to focus on something else for the rewards pool. Secondly, this encourages people to invest into the game's NFT's to benefit from the rewards pool even if they don't intend to play it actively.
This kind of rewards pool should certainly help to increase people's interest in purchasing and holding on to Rising Star's NFTs. dCity, another game on Hive, is already using a rewards pool with great success:
Now obviously, Rising Star would have a long way to go to reach dCity's numbers but nevertheless, you have to start somewhere and it's a proven concept that works flawlessly for dCity so why shouldn't it work here as well? On top of all that, Rising Star is a quite entertaining game that kept a lot of active players even with the recent economical issues it faced.
I'm convinced that this might be exactly what the game needed to regain its momentum . For the last months I had stopped to acquire new NFTs and only sold off my daily Starbits. From this day on, this is going to change. I'll start to build up my collection again and aim to enter the top spots in the rewards pool. Right now, I'm sitting at #52 and I won't sell any Starbits or NFTs until I've made it to the top 10. As always, I'll track my progress in my weekly Play2Earn Reports.
We'll have to wait and see how things will work out for Rising Star in 2021, but I certainly like the progress I'm seeing and I'm hopeful that my investment is going to pay off long term. In case you never tried the game so far, you might want to give it a shot even it you don't plan to compete for the top spots in the rewards pool. It's free to pick up and highly enjoyable!
And that's all from me for today. Thank you all for reading and see you next time!