📦 Creative Ideas to Improve Pack Sales in Splinterlands

Another week brings an amazing proposal by @thepeoplesguild to create original content for Splinterlands. This time, @thepeoplesguild is asking us to think and write about creative ideas for selling Splinterlands card packs, which I found to be quite an interesting subject of discussion, especially because any change we think of needs to be carefully analyzed since it could potentially disrupt the game's economy.

#TPGCHALLENGE

💡 How do we Improve Pack Sales in Splinterlands?

Hello, fellow Splinterlands players and avid readers! As mentioned in the introduction, the goal of this post is to explore how we could better promote the sale of packs in current and future editions of the game. I've been reflecting on this, and I believe the key to achieving this lies in making sure the game remains fun, engaging, and appealing to players.

END OF POST.

Of course, I'm just kidding! Or am I? 😄 Anyway, here are my real proposals. Maybe @yabapmatt can weigh in on this.

🚫 What I DON'T WANT: Promo Cards and Other Incentives

While promo cards and other additional items might seem like a good idea to boost sales, I don’t believe they have the desired long-term effect. Why? Because when you offer extra incentives, you’re promoting purchases based on those bonuses, not on the actual value of the packs themselves.

A prime example is Chaos Legion. To drive sales, the promo card Arkemis the Bear and several discounts were introduced, which did help initially. However, in the long run, it negatively affected the game’s economy and player satisfaction. 💰

I don’t want to delve into a debate about what happened, but I think it’s important to remember how decisions like these can affect both the current and future economy. Splinterlands has a strong and robust economy, but it’s also fragile in the sense that a bad decision now can cause disastrous effects in the future.

🚫 Packs for Specific Levels of Play

When thinking about how to achieve more or better sales, I believe the solution doesn’t lie in offering packs tailored for a specific target level of play. It's been proposed as an option to create pack sets tailored to the investment level of players, like offering basic decks for those who invest between $0 and $100 for bronze play, other sets for those who want to invest between $100 and $1000 to play in gold level, etc. However, I think it’s unnecessary for Splinterlands to offer this directly; it can be efficiently handled by third-party sites like Peakmonsters through the market.

My point is that Splinterlands should focus solely on selling packs and leave the rest to the users and third-party sites that can offer additional services.

✅ My proposals: 💪

Like I said before, I bring 2 proposals to the table. In all honesty, both are based on the same principle: bulk purchases.

I’m not an economist, but as a real-life merchant, I believe the best way to promote sales is by offering discounts for buying in bulk. That said, I’m not talking about huge discounts that would affect the economy. I’m talking about small but effective discounts that incentivize purchases without devaluing the product. This doesn’t contradict what I mentioned earlier about the risks of poorly applied discounts.

💼 Proposal 1: Return to Bulk Purchase Discounts

An effective strategy previously used is to offer extra packs when buying in bulk. In the past, players could use vouchers to get additional packs. Since vouchers had very low value, this effectively meant players would get bonus packs for their purchases if they could meet the minimum. This encouraged players to buy a bit more than they initially planned, helping to boost sales without significantly affecting the economy.

While this strategy has its detractors, I believe the benefits outweigh the costs. The bonuses offered in the past weren’t large enough to destabilize the market, but they were enough to incentivize bulk buying.

I propose bringing back discounts like:

• 🎟️ 5% off at 100 packs
• 🎟️ 10% off at 500 packs
• 🎟️ 15% off at 2000 packs

This worked in the past and didn’t significantly harm the economy, while boosting sales. Let's return to what was already proven effective!

📦 Proposal 2: Larger Pack Sizes

This is probably the most interesting part of the post since it's where I propose and bring something different to the table. In my opinion, another interesting idea would be to introduce larger packs containing more cards. The second proposal is similar but with a different approach: instead of offering additional packs as bonuses, I propose the @splinterlands team sells larger packs with more cards than usual, for example, packs with 500 cards instead of 5. This would give an interesting and fresh twist to pack sales in the game.

Imagine that a player could buy a pack with 525 cards at the price of 100 regular packs. Instead of paying for 100 standard packs, they would be buying a single pack with 525 cards, saving a bit in the process. This approach could be appealing for several reasons that I will point out later.

We could also offer an 11,500-card pack at the price of 2000 packs to offer the similar content of 2300 packs, incentivizing large buyers, but without negatively affecting the economy. The key here is that the bonus packs wouldn’t be awarded at the time of purchase, but when opening the pack, encouraging players to open it rather than resell it. One of the main criticisms about the bonus pack system is that people tend to buy just to resell in the secondary markets. This approach would eliminate that option.

Of course, this doesn’t completely solve that problem because people can still open the packs and sell the cards, and the effect would be the same. But that's why my proposal is basically to bring back bulk sales. I don’t think bulk sales are bad if they are measured, and the discounts are not something crazy. After all, one could argue that the real price of a pack is the one with the bulk discount applied.

Here are a few sizes I suggest:

• 🎴 20-card pack (at the price of 4 regular packs)
• 🎴 525-card pack (at the price of 100 regular packs, with a 5% bonus)
• 🎴 2750-card pack (at the price of 500 regular packs, with a 10% bonus)
• 🎴 11,500-card pack (at the price of 2000 regular packs, with a 15% bonus)

In essence, the bonuses are the same that we used to have with bonus packs since I didn’t dare to tweak the numbers, but wouldn’t it be cool to open a single pack and receive more than 10k cards? I think something like that could be amazing for promoting the game in streams, posts, social media, etc.

Is important to note that this proposal does not include changes to the rates of gold foild and card rarity. Once again I dont dare to mess with numbers that can affect balance. Also the big packs would still require the same amount of potions per card to be opened, that doesnt need to be changed.

I think if this was implemented in this way or other similar ways, it wouldn’t really change much from what we used to have in terms of raw numbers, but it would give us something new and shiny to play with. As drawbacks, I know this can cause some extra work for the Splinterlands team, but maybe it's not that hard to do—who knows. Also, there’s no need to implement all the crazy numbers I’m proposing. We can start small with just packs of 20 cards to see if people are interested, but I’m guessing they will.

📊 Summary

In conclusion, I believe that these two proposals—reintroducing bonus packs for bulk purchases and offering larger pack sizes—could be great strategies to increase sales without harming Splinterlands' economy.

Thank you for reading! I hope these ideas spark a conversation, and I look forward to hearing what you all think. 🤔💬

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