A few weeks ago, I bought about 200 UNTAMED Splinterlands packs for about 400 dollars on Hive-Engine and today, I opened them all and gained cards to the value of around 2100 dollars. That is not a bad turnaround and while I have no idea if in the future the unopened packs will be worth more, currently I am enjoying playing the game a bit and now I have a little bit more room to expand.
While I still have no idea how long I will play for before I lose interest or decide I am spending too much time on it and go cold-turkey like I did with other games, what I find interesting is how addictive it can be. Not the game itself, though it is more interesting than I thought it would be, but the play combined with the economic aspect means that the "game" is far more complex than something on the Playstation.
And, because of the skin in the game, it becomes more addictive again, as it essentially demands attention, as there is real costs to play and, playing attracts more rewards. This drives an internal demand loop that at least most people will be affected by.
After opening the 190 UNTAMED packs I had left, I jokingly asked 
Keep writing.
This is what I plan on doing anyway of course, because while I have quite liked sitting building some teams to play while I am watching the Olympics, I prefer the feeling I get from writing. Plus, I suspect that at least on a daily level, I will probably earn more from my writing than I will from my playing - especially since I pretty much suck at the moment. Though after only about a week of playing in the evenings, I am doing okay, though I do have a couple cards delegated to me to help me along.
The joys of holding social capital!
The social side to this is also a big draw for the game and while I have barely stepped into the Splinterlands Discord and likely won't spend much time there, it is pretty clear that the active players communicate a fair bit and all know each other, if only by reputation. This is a massive thing when people are saying, "So and So are the best players in the world" and speaks of the potential to come.
I think in the future, not only will Splinterlands need to build more around the community aspect, it too becomes an integral part of the value potential, for as we know, Hive already has a massive amount of experience with tokenization and rewarding of content around communities. This is already happening now, but I see a future where it becomes smoother and more polished, where millions pf people are able to play, breathe and live off Splinterlands globally.
Before opening the packs I was asked if I was an investor or a speculator and I think that just like Hive, I am both, but on Splinterlands I am currently more interested in the game itself than the desire to sell unseen packs at some future profit. Ideally, I could be both, but at this point, I am not going to spend thousands of hours and dollars building from scratch to try and earn from it and I will keep it at the distance of fun.
Who know though, perhaps at some point the cards I have are worth something significant to players coming into the game and they will want to rent or buy and I will be willing to sell, but for now, it will remain the most expensive game I have ever played, even though what I hold pales in comparison to the majority of players out there.
What I am most interested in personally is the effect that this can have on the greater Hive ecosystem and the people interacting on the Hive blockchain. I think that for many, Splinterlands is a good enough reason to be here, for many others, it is a great secondary reason to be here. I see that in the future, there will be more secondary products and services that pop up to interact with Splinterlands and add more value streams to it.
For Hive this gives an attractive gateway in and for Splinterlands, Hive gives access to a whole lot of supporting aspects that mean the community can grow in multiple ways simultaneously, without the dev team having to do it all. Not only this, all of the secondary channels will also benefit from tokenization and gamification, creating dozens of games for players to play, while they play the main game itself.
what is cool about Hive, is that it can support many such experiences and offer them all access to a lot of positive aspects that they can leverage and compound with each other, so that they all reside in a complex ecosystem where technology, economy and society can all reside and interact with each other in a feeless, transparent and decentralized way. Pretty cool.
While a 500% gain on an investment is great, as most of my skin is in the Hive ecosystem game, the most exciting financial part is what it means for everything else. As I have always said, I believe the potential to build a massively valuable ecosystem on the Hive blockchain is huge and current market is only a drop in the ocean as to what will be arriving into the industry in the next couple years. When people come, they will find far more than a game or a social platform, they will find a place that they can interact with daily and make part of their habits and a piece of their homes.
Ownership is what this is all about and the more hooks we own, the more value we can capture.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
