It seems to me that one of the bigger problems is monetizing the application.

According to messages found on Discord, maintaining the server costs $75,000 per month, which is about $2,500 per day. With a daily player count of around 7,000, this translates to a cost of approximately $0.35 per day, or over $10 per month per player.

I’m not sure if these are all the costs, as maintaining the server can mean everything: both the infrastructure itself and employee salaries, among many other things.

Now, the main question is: how does Splinterlands make money, besides generating new portions of DEC and SPS and releasing new expansions? With the current number of players, these revenue sources are highly inflationary. We have more and more cards and tokens, whose value must decrease because there is no demand for them.

In my opinion, focusing solely on attracting new players is not enough and will not fix the situation in the long run, because when players realize that the value of their assets is constantly decreasing, they will leave.

Maybe it’s time to think about a way to bring in money from outside the player base? Perhaps some non-intrusive ads displayed while waiting for a match, for example, every 10 matches?

You yourself wrote:

I originally started playing because I really appreciated the fact that I could sell all my assets if I wanted to quit. So a lot of it felt like an investment in the future. Well, this investment is now not worth nearly what it used to be

I think this mechanism is both a blessing and a curse. While in other games, a player pays and accepts upfront that they won’t get their money back for the entertainment, in games like Splinterlands, most will feel disappointed or like losers when the value of their assets keeps dropping.