The earnings this year were cut in half to 464$ compared to the 898$ the year before. However, this doesn't include the constant value decline of the assets. I don't think there are many who actually are up on their Splinterlands Journey over time, and the only real way to do so, I would argue, is to focus on making 2 Weekly blog posts about the game joining the challenges.

Anyone who comes in and buys packs eventually will get crushed financially as what they can earn never matches what they will lose in asset values unless they get crazy lucky. Anyone also can very quickly see this by looking at card prices of older cards. You pay 4$ for a pack that most of the time will include 4 commons and 1 rare (burn value of 0.04$ at DEC Peg), while a max-level old common card on the market that includes 400 copies costs 2$.

That is the reason why there are no new players, aside from those who recently wanted to profit from the Free2Play Frontiers Mode, which also is seeing the first signs of collapse already.

That said, I still don't think it's that bad the earning that I actually got from Splinterlands last year. Especially since I don't really have to waste time playing anymore as nearly everything is automated. It's also hard to see many of my assets (which are all older cards) devalue even more as many of they are near DEC burn value.