It has been a little over a week since we published our DHF proposal to ask for help from the Hive community and we are extremely grateful that the proposal currently has over 26M Hive Power voting for it.
There has been a ton of comments, feedback, and discussions over the past week, which is to be expected for a proposal of this size, so we wanted to take this opportunity to make another post to help address some of the main questions and concerns that we have been hearing from the community.
Splinterlands Has No Plans to Leave Hive
First and foremost, we want to be completely clear that we have absolutely no plans to move off of the Hive blockchain either now or in the future, regardless of whether or not our proposal gets funded.
What was stated in the proposal is that it is possible that we could be forced to do so in the future, even if the team prefers not to. Our responsibility is to the company shareholders and to the players, so if we are unable to grow and be successful on the Hive blockchain, and a good opportunity presents itself on another platform, we may be obligated to take it.
If the Hive community chooses to support the project, however, then it gives us a much higher chance of being able to turn things around and once again be extremely successful here on Hive, which greatly lowers the chances that we will ever need to even entertain a discussion with other blockchain platforms in the future.
Use of Funds
A number of people have asked for a detailed breakdown of how the funds will be used. We cannot provide a detailed breakdown because we don't yet know exactly how they will be used. Generally, they are planned to be used for marketing and promotion of the Splinterlands game, and therefore indirectly the Hive blockchain.
Hiring a really effective marketing person or agency is expected to cost around $100k - $200k per year. We will then work with them to create a plan to bring the most people as possible to the game and convert them into long-term active players. The additional funds from this proposal are expected to be used to implement the marketing plan and to improve our onboarding experience (which includes creating a Hive account, setting up keychain, etc) so the new players that come in stick around as much as possible. This is an iterative process which requires making changes, running A/B tests, looking at the feedback and data, and seeing what worked and what didn't.
Promoting Hive
While we have been non-stop promoters of Hive since day one of Splinterlands (and even before that), we have heard feedback that the Hive community would like more mention and promotion of Hive to players within the game product itself.
To that end, the Splinterlands team plans to work a number of items, including:
- Adding "Powered by Hive" with the Hive logo to our branding, both internal and external (see the image at the top of this post for an example)
- Adding a module to the in-game "academy" system we are building as part of our improved onboarding experience about the basics of Hive and links to explore the other apps and opportunities in the Hive ecosystem beyond Splinterlands
- Adding some in-game promotions for Hive Power holders which will both reward existing HP holders for their support as well as encourage non-HP holders who play Splinterlands to acquire and power up some HIVE tokens
Open Source
Making Splinterlands open source has been a long-term goal of ours for quite a while now, but it is a massive project which will require significant resources and we have, unfortunately, not been in a position to focus on it much since the change in leadership. As a start, we have been working on building an open source "validator" project for the SPS token within the game, and are working with the SPS DAO to take over the funding for that project and get it over the finish line within the next year, if not much sooner.
Once the company returns to solid profitability and we have additional resources available, it is our plan to continue open sourcing more components of the game with the ultimate goal being that the entire project is open and available for others to fork and run and is no longer dependent upon the Splinterlands company in any way.
The Opportunity for Hive
We also wanted to take a little more time to highlight the opportunity that Splinterlands presents for the Hive ecosystem in general. We firmly believe that, going forward, the success of blockchain platforms will be primarily based on the applications that are built on top of them. We expect that the applications are what will bring in the users, the attention, and the capital.
Having a "breakout app" on Hive will do far more than any other type of marketing or promotion we can think of, and we're trying to make that happen. That breakout app may be Splinterlands, or it may be something else, but the more shots that are taken, the more chance there will be of success.
We believe that Splinterlands has a good chance of making this happen, and as Hive stakeholders ourselves we hope to see many other Hive-based applications trying to "break out" and take Hive "mainstream" along side of us.
No Guarantees
Finally, a number of comments have asked what "guarantees" there will be if the proposal is approved. Unfortunately, it's not possible to make any guarantees. This is an investment by the Hive community, and like all investment there is risk and success is never guaranteed.
The only things we can guarantee are that we will do whatever we can with the resources we have to make this product a success, that we are committed to keeping Splinterlands here on the Hive blockchain if at all possible, and that we will continue to promote and support Hive as we have for the past six years.