RE: Splinterlands Strategies: Work Monsters, WORK!
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Enriched! 🤣
I put everything back into cards at a time when they were elevated 10x higher than they are now. I'm at a loss of about $40k.
While I don't disagree bots had something to do with the decline, my opinion is more that what the team did in response is really what collapsed the economy. I've always been of the impression that the team got overwhelmed and pulled the plug. Recent interviews with Matt where he talks about how overwhelmed and unprepared they were to deal with it, makes me more confident in that idea.
The actions of the team did two things. It collpased growth/sent it in retreat and it made them a bunch of money so they could build an infrastructure that was more sustainable. Ever since then its been rebuilding, resetting the rules of the economy, and trying to prepare for the next run up. T
hey've just been unable to get it going due to the macro economy and all the salt that they built up from when they collapsed the splinterlands economy the first time.
We can trace a lot of things back to the bots and bad data that arose from their presence. It impacted everything and caused a great overestimation of the Splinterlands' reach. The damage to marketing is quite clear: Bad data, bad on-boarding, misunderstanding the audience, bad and isolating gameplay experience.
I don't think 'overwhelmed' is the right description of the response. They lost confidence in their own ecosystem. They always needed an external FOMO and they couldn't cultivate anything outside of the Hive space. Runi's formation story was a dead giveaway that they felt inferior and the marketing efforts reflected it. They needed gimmicks, when they had a perfectly fine game that needed certain fixes and deliverables met. Growing the game meant having to sell this ecosystem and the benefits of it to new players and build partnerships in the real world (not crypto) that would provide greater extensibility to the tokens and assets.
You don't give up on marketing when there's a market downturn. You have to figure out how your ecosystem/product provides value and get it in front of the right people and partners. They're a gaming software company with a DAO, not a pure DeFi operation. However, they didn't see things that way.