I've got to be honest here. I'm not the biggest fan of the Hive-blockchain. At its core, it's meant to be that proof-of-brain social chain that rewards you for the time and attention you and your articles garner from other people. In reality, though, it's mostly just auto-voting, curation-trails, and people voting for each other. If you leave out a few of the top authors, a lot of articles probably don't have even 10 real people actually reading them, even if they got a hundred votes or more. At the same time, there seems to be a lot of infighting between different whales, wildly differing ideas of what the chain is meant to be, down-vote wars, and what not. But if you can look beyond all of that negative stuff, Hive certainly is one thing - the best blockchain there is for blockchain-gaming!
With blocks written every three seconds and zero fees for anything you do on the chain, Hive is far superior to basically any other chain operating out there if it comes to powering true web 3 gaming. I know what you are going to say now, all the most successful blockchain games out there don't use Hive, they do just fine running on Ethereum or one of its layer-two side chains. And you know what? That's true. But these games aren't thriving because they are using a superior chain, they are thriving despite using a vastly inferior solution for gaming.
It's just crazy how much time and effort is being invested into finding solutions to the massive inefficiency of ETH in regard to gaming. Immutable X, the Base Network, the Binance Smart Chain, and what not are all trying to solve things that have already been solved!
On top of that, a lot if not all of these very successful blockchain games aren't actually web 3 games. They are more or less fully centralized web 2 games with some tokenomics slapped on top. They don't run on chain, they are fully controlled by a single entity, and more often than not, they are really just using blockchain and web 3 as an excuse to charge absurd amounts of money for their games.
The truth is, most of these games don't care about their players, they don't care about whether anybody is ever going to recoup their investment or not. They simply found a way to charge more money from their players and so it's only consequential for them to move to the chains where the most money is to be made - and that's obviously Ethereum. But what happens when you build on Ethereum? Well let me tell you, it becomes next to impossible to make any meaningful trades on less rare items.
If you follow my blog you certainly are aware that I'm a huge fan of Parallel and besides Splinterlands it's indeed my most favorite blockchain game right now. Yet there's a huge difference in how I look at those titles. I'm invested in Splinterlands because I believe in their vision, I believe in what they are doing and I believe that they are truly the future of blockchain-gaming. Of course I'm also invested because I hope to earn money, obviously, but that's just one piece of the puzzle. Parallel though? I'm involved because I like money, lot's of it, and I enjoy having fun while earning it. But there's no vision there beyond building games and earning money. There's no same moon philosophy. And, you already guessed it, there's no solid blockchain operating it.
Parallel chose to go where the money is and so they are building on Ethereum. They do have a Base Network integration and indeed, some of their NFTs also live on base but that's only for a small subset of cards and it's very telling that all of their major NFT collections are always being released on Ethereum. That way they do get a lot of eyes on their project. But they also massively hurt their players by doing so. Say I wanted to randomly sell a card from my collection that's worth $50 right now. Here's the fee I'd have to pay for that in this very moment:
Pretty affordable, isn't it? The thing is, I really like what Parallel is trying to do. There are so many different cosmetics to spend your Prime on that you will never be able to own them all unless you buy with outside money. On top of that, a lot of these cosmetics are minted by the players instead of the company. So the concept is cool, but the reality is very sobering. Minting any of these NFTs is 3 prime (about $30 right now) but you also have to pay the gas fees which will amount to another $30-$40 right now. So minting an NFT is somewhere around the $60 to $70 mark. To make minting them worth it, you obviously have to sell them for at least $100. Unsurprisingly, though, this simply doesn't happen. Here's a cosmetic NFT from their first battle pass ever:
Zero sales. Zero! The highest bid for this thing is 5 Prime right now - so if you take the deal, you are guaranteed to loose money. It's crazy! Now let's look back at Hive and the by far most relevant game running on it - Splinterlands:
In the last 24 hours we had 27,761 sales! Doing these on Ethereum would cost millions of dollars! But in Splinterlands, this is just a normal day and nothing special at all. I can check the market and pick up cards for as cheap as 6 cents:
This is something completely unheard of for these so called major web 3 games but it's a necessity to have a real vibrant market and to make it viable to sell any card at any time. Of course games like Parallel have extremely expensive NFTs that are worth trading - I have a NFT listed for 2 ETH right now - but that can't be the goal of a web 3 game. The idea of Play2Own should be that you get to sell any asset any time you want and actually have a realistic shot at earning back at least a portion of original investment.
That's why Hive is so superior in terms of blockchain gaming and that's why Splinterlands is what the future of web 3 looks like. Alas, this is nothing new, it's been the same in the last bull cycle and it will likely be the same in the next one. Is Hive ever going to go mainstream? Frankly? I doubt it. With all the issues I've mentioned above, we are always going to stay niche. But to me, that's okay. I'll still dabble with the mainstream chains whenever I see the possibility to earn me some money. And sure, these titles over there can still be entertaining. But Hive and Splinterlands is where my home is and where it's going to stay. We might not be the biggest community, we might not have the strongest pumps, but we sure are closer to the vision of web 3 than almost any other title out there!
And that's all from me for today, thank you all for reading and see you next time!
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