I'm 38 years old now to give you a frame of reference. I started playing video games at the end of the Atari era. On the NES though is where I started, specifically Super Mario Bros. I remember thinking as a 7-year-old or so that I wish I could play games and make money.
The first instance that I saw a game where you could earn money was Ultima online and you had to go on the black market websites. If they found out you were selling the gold currency they would ban your account. You had to be a cheater to farm fast enough for it to be worth it.
It wasn't until World of Warcraft that I finally started getting excited about the idea of selling items for real money that you could get within a video game. People were selling their character accounts for $100 and upwards, but it was extremely frowned upon as you probably remember. I wasn't comfortable buying and selling accounts, going against their terms of service, so I tried to look into alternate games such as second life and a weird swedish game I forget the name of.
People were making a lot of money with virtual real estate within Second Life, but the game was extremely boring, so I moved on. Then came the YouTube explosion and Twitch, so I thought I could just play games and record it for money, but I don't have the charismatic personality to be a YouTube star.
Then came Facebook games, notably Farmville and notably Mafia Wars where people could power up their game Mafia and top level accounts were selling for $100. That blown up fast and now Facebook doesn't even have games really because of their back door to hacking privacy.
Finally, we come to block chain and the foundation for investment and piggybacking off of that to fund games. I discovered axi Infinity very late and that was boring too. By the time I found it, the price of ethereum was three or $4,000. With that came the NFT craze and I had wondered before if the blockchain could be used for other digital assets besides non graphical coins.
Hopefully I don't get downvoted for the infinity criticism, to be honest I haven't played it, but it looks like the pay to win, DLC heavy, smart phone games.
This past year or so I became more disenfranchised with centralized social media because of the gatekeepers being able to just ban anyone for anything so I looked into alternatives and found the hive network just a few weeks ago. I was hooked and bewildered and in still learning about all the terms and mechanisms, but I had noticed early on splinterlands showing up on the block feed all day long. The game reminded me of my childhood because of the Magic the Gathering card game and of course Pokemon cards.
So what about Splinterlands have I waited 20 years for exactly? Instead of me trying to find card packs or cards in the store, I can just buy them on the game. I think the concept of being able to rent out cards is pure genius because as a collector I hate to get rid of cards and it's any collector's conundrum whether to hold or sell for money. Renting eliminates this problem.
With NFT technology you actually own the digital asset and because Hive is an actual cryptocurrency it has decentralized funding so the money invested in the game doesn't go to a conglomerate that keeps most of the money. At the rate of inflation for the US dollar, I'm actually more comfortable keeping all of my earnings in Hive.
Mobile games and the pay to win era, along with DLC in general, always made me feel cheated in a way like I was too weak to wait a day for the item upgrade or building to build. To top it off, you didn't even own the digital aspect, it was still the property rights of the game company.
Splinterlands is well funded by people and it is an incredibly fun game that I can't seem to stop playing and learning about. I'm probably going to transfer most of the hbd I earn into the Splinterlands game, rather than converting back to USD or more hive power.
I love strategy games namely age of empires, risk, plague, so this game fits right into my genre preference as you have to anticipate what the players deck will be and how to counter it. You can also play the same deck and win 10 in a row and then all of a sudden you won't win anyone until you switch it up. I find that incredibly entertaining because it's not just about obtaining the most powerful deck at your level.
Thank you for reading, now I'm off back to the game.
