Financial Markets tend to go in Cycles that are pretty much always similar & the same is true for both Cypto in general or a game like Splinterlands. This is how I view the past and potential Future Cycles the game will go through...
Splinterlands Cycle Until Now...
1. The Start
Splinterlands started out as a small project on the Steem blockchain with a very basic-looking product and a niche audience of users of Steemit.com. There was not much to be earned initially but players enjoyed the game while the devs continued to develop and improve the product very slowly growing in numbers.
2. Initial Catalysts
The introduction of DEC as a reward token that could be earned was a very nice catalyst in the game along with the fact that way too many rewards were given to the rather small player-base. This made players take advantage of creating bot accounts and more players to come in who were a part of Steemit but weren't initially convinced (like me).
3. Improvements and Fixing Leaks
This was followed by a period where a lot of needed changes were made to make sure the economy could sustain itself. Collection Power was introduced and there was some initial resistance from players as it became just a lot harder to get rewards. There was also a sell-off from whales who left the ecosystem after the move from Steem to Hive followed by quite a long period where the player base was not really growing that much.
4. Explosion
SPS really made the game explode in new users at the time Governance Tokens and Play2Earn were getting hot because of Axie Infinity. This came at the time when Untamed Packs also sold out creating a crazy gap between Supply & Demand. Nobody was willing to sell while players were earning more which made more new players want to come in. These new players created more demand pushing the prices up even more which again increased the earnings to a point where things went really crazy. One of the reasons why it happened is because new uniformed players highly overvalued level 1 cards while they are not supposed to be worth that much.
5. Supply Flood
This crazy period was followed by a flood of supply in Cards and DEC as the number of printed reward cards of the new set were multiplied by 20 while DEC which was trading well above its intended peg because it was so powerful for the SPS airdrop causing a lot more to get printed. On top of this, the new Chaos Legion set was released which made it a lot cheaper for all the newer players that got in to buy those packs & cards instead of the older ones.
6. Decreasing Prices & Negative Spiral
I would say this is the stage we are in now with prices going down due to the increased supply which makes players earn less causing many that came in just for the money to capitulate pushing the prices down more making players earn less and so on. This can clearly be seen in the charts of both DEC and SPS.
7. Stagnation while Devs Keep Building
The player base of the game right now seems to stay quite flat which actually is a good thing showing that there are many players who are staying for the game despite the earnings no longer being what they used to be. The devs also managed to expand their team and are working hard of all kinds of upcoming features and expansions along with fixes to improve the game economy making it more robust giving players better incentives to hold cards while making it harder for bad actors who just want money to leech that from the game. The latests Town Hall (Link) overall was quite bullish on the game as they shared a lot of the upcoming plans for Land, New Reward Cards, Modern/Wild Format/...
Next Splinterlands Cycle Prediction...
If anything, many players still very much enjoy the game while it gets harder for those who want to exploit the earnings to do so and the Devs have shown a good long-term vision. The big question always remains if enough new players are yet to come in to make things explode up again which I personally believe there are. The next boom cycle likely won't be as explosive as the last one but I do see good reasons why at some point it could repeat especially because of the Land Expansion.
This is how I see it playing out:
The way Land works is that players who own the land will be able to mint the Spells & Items which they can sell on the market. Since it takes time to mint these there will be a crazy low supply at the start while at the same time the demand will be quite big since every player is going to need them. So most likely, at the start they will be crazy overpriced as whales who will be the initial buyers don't really care that much about the money. This combined with the fact that a lot of Cards / SPS / ... likely will have to be put to use on the land reducing that supply should make the returns for Splinterlands Players go up. This might create a new hype cycle where a lot more new players come in because earnings are higher again pushing prices higher which brings in more players creating another peak.
I guess the time when returns are starting to get really high will be the time to potentially take some profit as it again will be followed by a likely supply flood making everything affordable again for new players that came in during the expansion phase. Right now it's hard to say how low things will go but starting to accumulate might not be the worst idea at the moment already cost-averaging while things continue to go down. Especially if you enjoy the game for what it is and treat it all as a regular game you can't really do much wrong.
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