Well, the rental market sure is changing fast.
Last week it was bots. This week its just mountains of inventory on top of an absolutely stagnant market.
Every time a rental of mine ends I have to lower the price more. And usually even if you hit the bottom price, there's so much inventory coming in that before it rents you get undercut many times and I have to drop the price several more times to finally get it rented again. I've had cards that regularly rent for 30-40 that's I've had to drop below 5 to get them rented again and this is during what's supposed to be the end of season ramp up.
Speaking of which, there doesn't seem to be much of an end of season ramp going this time. Rentals the last two seasons by this point were up over 50%. This season they are up 10% in volume while they are still locked in around $29k which is where they were 3 weeks ago.
In fact, here's my numbers. That Return on asset number last season at this time was almost 150% while two weeks later it sits at 54% and thats an improvement from where it's been the last few days.
The big cards like Llama, Zaku, and Kron which used to be easy rentals at 400 are now struggling to stay above 150. Even Mylor is starting to teeter.
It's brutal right now. And this is before CL happens.
So I'd like to take this moment and again say, there is far too much inventory in this game right now and I really hope they take that into account when they release CL.
I think they should completely rethink the ricing strategy with these packs and price the all in DEC only. If it's going to be credits, match Untamed in number of packs released and make them $5 each minimum.
Also, they need to do something about the diminishing DEC rewards. A lot of this growth recently has been people with bots opening double digit accounts and running bots on them all day. That's why active accounts and games played have been steady tracking upward but every single other metric is crashing. These aren't real players. Bots don't need a bunch of cards. Just a few winners they can play over and over again. Meanwhile, they split the DEC pool so real people are getting almost nothing for playing.
Once you have the bot it only takes a few cards and a spellbook to create another account for farming. I think that's why spellbooks kept trucking higher for a while although they've since crashed 41% from their highs 3 days ago, going from 13,500 on September 8th down to 8000 on September 11th.
Some people believe Splinterlands is inevitable but there are exactly two things that could kill this game and we are flirting with both of them and the metrics are screaming it.
- Card oversupply killing scarcity and profitability.
- Making it unprofitable to play the game by lowering rewards.
They could do anything else they wanted and Splinterlands would thrive but if you mess up either of these two, it's over.
I have about $50k into this game in recent months. It would be great if they don't kill it.