Steem Games: Comparing Splinterlands, DrugWars and NextColony
There are several games running on the Steem blockchain, proving that crypto games can be very successful with such a fast and zero-transaction fees technology. I am looking at the top three games and what they mean to me both from a gaming and from a financial perspective.
Splinterlands
No other game I know makes it easier for us to earn money: With the virtual trading card game @Splinterlands, we get live card matches against other players, with a high strategic element to it. The only requirement is having a starter pack for $10 and you can start earning Dark Energy Crystals (DEC) with each won ranked battle. On the lower leagues, this will be a rather little income, as DEC will quadruple when your league points double. However, you additionally earn reward cards for the daily quests, which you can sell on the market. With the earnings, you can get important cards from the market and improve your deck, to further rise in the league and increase your income.
From a gaming perspective, Splinterlands has grown into an addictive game, that is incredible fun to play and very challenging to get to the highest league positions. The combination with daily income, has made Splinterlands and important part of my daily routine.
From an investor perspective, @Splinterlands has gone up with pretty much everything they are doing. After a bit over one year, the value of the cards has consistently growing, to a point where I feel a bigger FOMO now, than shortly before the end of the Alpha. Remember how the Alpha sold the final 100k booster packs in a single day? I am not waiting for the Beta to sell out, to stockpile more cards and improve my second playing deck. With one Diamond League deck (pretty much all cards maxed) and one Gold League deck (all rare summoners on level 6, most other cards on appropriate levels for that), I am now basically earning my monthly rent just with playing Splinterlands.
Possible Earnings: 5/5
I am giving Splinterlands 5 out of 5 money bags for potential earnings. Daily Quest Rewards, Bi-Weekly Season Rewards, direct DEC for won ranked matches, growing card prices, rental market and an entire Tribe token with Splintertalk (#SPT), where you can earn upvotes for Splinterlands content in a second special game token. Can you ask for anything more?
DrugWars
The second big game on the Steem blockchain was @DrugWars. The browser game allows you to build out your base and recruit thugs to attack other players for their resources. Most actions in the game require long waiting times, until new buildings are leveled up or troops are recruited. It is a patience game and your account grows over time, if you care for it and defend yourself against other players. You can earn the FUTURE token, by doing quests, getting a share of the daily heist and by battling other players. Your payouts are coming out of a shared reward pool, which is replenished every day.
The probably most interesting method of earning with the game, is the feature to daily post your best battles and earn upvotes in Steem with them. Recently, this has been changed into a comment and doesn't clutter your Steem profile anymore. The upvotes from Drugwars are not huge but accumulate over time. Regular players are certainly profiting from this system in the long run. The game itself is challenging and offers a lot of activities, including quests and guilds (aka Gangs).
I have been a rather late investor into the game and I have not been able to even come close to my original investment, although it has already been over half a year or so, that I am playing the game. Financially-wise, the game has been disappointing. However, unlike Splinterlands, I have not been as engaged and surely miss out a lot of the potential of the game. Many recent updates have made the gameplay more interesting and increased my chances as a casual player, to build out my base and actually playing the game without being farmed without hope. I am giving the game a chance again as it has grown into a proper product now.
Possible Earnings: 1/5
I am giving DrugWars 1 out of 5 money bags for potential earnings. You can basically play the game entirely for free and start earning a few FUTURE tokens and Steem upvotes with your posted battles. However, since there is no trading of any virtual assets other than the in-game currency, I haven't felt motivated enough to invest much of my time or money to really explore the game to its depths.
NextColony
The third large game project on the Steem blockchain is @NextColony, a space explorer browser game that mirrors the popular Ogame or its offspring GalaxyWars. Like DrugWars, you can build out your base and earn resources, which will take a lot of time and patience. Eventually you can start building ships and explorer the space around your planet, build battleships and fight or trade with other players. The game uses a 30% revenue share model, where some of the income of the ingame-shop is being distributed to players. This hasn't started yet and everyone is waiting for the honey pot to open. There will be three ways to get your hands on the rewards but we will have yet to see how that works.
From a gaming standpoint, NextColony is very slow but also really addictive. I have been spending many hours to play all the aspects of the game and we are still very early on. Many of the features have not been activated yet and it is already such an incredible game. Thanks to blockchain technology, we have several third party tools already, something that would be unthinkable with traditional games. In fact, I am spending more time on 
I have been investing a lot into the game and was luckily able to get most of my investment already back, even before the revenue share started. As NextColony uses a similar technology like Splinterlands, to create digital ownership of transferable items like Ships and Planets, I was able to manually sell some of my battleships for Steem. This business model has collapsed now, as more and more ships are constantly being produced, but eventually I still see demand for my ships, particularly when the honey pot is open and people see the financial possibilities of dominating the game. Ships will become much more interesting, when money floats out of the game.
Possible Earnings: 3/5
I am giving NextColony 3 out of 5 money bags for potential earnings, on a good-will basis, as the revenue share model still has yet to come. However, the game already offers an amazing digital ownership model for planets and ships and is hence a few steps ahead of DrugWars. You can always sell your assets manually, if you find a buyer. Soon enough, there will be marketplaces for the game, making trade much easier. And when the honey pot opens, over 40k Steem are already waiting to be claimed by the players.
Conclusion
All of the three game leaders on Steem are interesting to play and bring a financial gain for the players. The funny thing is, that this is no competition between the games but they are rather complementing each other and work together in a tandem, where players can play all of them every day and earn with all them, bit by bit, growing their Steem accounts and stake in the game.
I see a golden future for gaming on Steem, as it basically brings all we can ask for to have a proper ecosystem for content creators and consumers. We can post articles, images, videos, live-streams and even monetize all of that in multiple ways. In fact, I do believe we haven't seen nothing yet.
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