GLG made a "splash" with the whole Pump & Burn scandal. There is absolutely no marketing for this game. They chose the wrong sport to start with, it would have much easier to go straight for College Football, there's a built-in audience for it and the student-athletes are relentless marketers on social media. It may not be popular outside of the United States, but it is incredibly lucrative.
Splinterlands has no clear idea of their target market and when they did run a pretty decent campaign on Snapchat, the mobile UX wrecked conversions. The strategy of riding on Bitcoin's coattails without an understanding of how Beta works is alarming. The community is shrinking and the ecosystem is hurting. There has only been one fork of Splinterlands, Splinterforge, and there is a need for more forks and creativity to give the assets greater utility.
Leo has some interesting offshoots of activity beyond the blogging. The most potential still lies with LeoThreads, which if they want to gain traction, requires a name change desperately. Not everything has to be and have a look that is associated with Hive.Blog... which leads into Hive.
Hive has the following issues dragging it down:
But hey, what do I know, right?
RE: It pays to write on Hive, not to promote Hive