There are several games running on the Steem blockchain, proving that crypto games can be very successful with such a fast and zero-transaction fees technology. I am looking at the top three games and what they mean to me both from a gaming and from a financial perspective.
Splinterlands
No other game I know makes it easier for us to earn money: With the virtual trading card game @Splinterlands, we get live card matches against other players, with a high strategic element to it. The only requirement is having a starter pack for $10 and you can start earning Dark Energy Crystals (DEC) with each won ranked battle. On the lower leagues, this will be a rather little income, as DEC will quadruple when your league points double. However, you additionally earn reward cards for the daily quests, which you can sell on the market. With the earnings, you can get important cards from the market and improve your deck, to further rise in the league and increase your income.
From a gaming perspective, Splinterlands has grown into an addictive game, that is incredible fun to play and very challenging to get to the highest league positions. The combination with daily income, has made Splinterlands and important part of my daily routine.
From an investor perspective, @Splinterlands has gone up with pretty much everything they are doing. After a bit over one year, the value of the cards has consistently growing, to a point where I feel a bigger FOMO now, than shortly before the end of the Alpha. Remember how the Alpha sold the final 100k booster packs in a single day? I am not waiting for the Beta to sell out, to stockpile more cards and improve my second playing deck. With one Diamond League deck (pretty much all cards maxed) and one Gold League deck (all rare summoners on level 6, most other cards on appropriate levels for that), I am now basically earning my monthly rent just with playing Splinterlands.
Possible Earnings: 5/5
I am giving Splinterlands 5 out of 5 money bags for potential earnings. Daily Quest Rewards, Bi-Weekly Season Rewards, direct DEC for won ranked matches, growing card prices, rental market and an entire Tribe token with Splintertalk (#SPT), where you can earn upvotes for Splinterlands content in a second special game token. Can you ask for anything more?
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DrugWars
The second big game on the Steem blockchain was @DrugWars. The browser game allows you to build out your base and recruit thugs to attack other players for their resources. Most actions in the game require long waiting times, until new buildings are leveled up or troops are recruited. It is a patience game and your account grows over time, if you care for it and defend yourself against other players. You can earn the FUTURE token, by doing quests, getting a share of the daily heist and by battling other players. Your payouts are coming out of a shared reward pool, which is replenished every day.
The probably most interesting method of earning with the game, is the feature to daily post your best battles and earn upvotes in Steem with them. Recently, this has been changed into a comment and doesn't clutter your Steem profile anymore. The upvotes from Drugwars are not huge but accumulate over time. Regular players are certainly profiting from this system in the long run. The game itself is challenging and offers a lot of activities, including quests and guilds (aka Gangs).
I have been a rather late investor into the game and I have not been able to even come close to my original investment, although it has already been over half a year or so, that I am playing the game. Financially-wise, the game has been disappointing. However, unlike Splinterlands, I have not been as engaged and surely miss out a lot of the potential of the game. Many recent updates have made the gameplay more interesting and increased my chances as a casual player, to build out my base and actually playing the game without being farmed without hope. I am giving the game a chance again as it has grown into a proper product now.
Possible Earnings: 1/5
I am giving DrugWars 1 out of 5 money bags for potential earnings. You can basically play the game entirely for free and start earning a few FUTURE tokens and Steem upvotes with your posted battles. However, since there is no trading of any virtual assets other than the in-game currency, I haven't felt motivated enough to invest much of my time or money to really explore the game to its depths.
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NextColony
The third large game project on the Steem blockchain is @NextColony, a space explorer browser game that mirrors the popular Ogame or its offspring GalaxyWars. Like DrugWars, you can build out your base and earn resources, which will take a lot of time and patience. Eventually you can start building ships and explorer the space around your planet, build battleships and fight or trade with other players. The game uses a 30% revenue share model, where some of the income of the ingame-shop is being distributed to players. This hasn't started yet and everyone is waiting for the honey pot to open. There will be three ways to get your hands on the rewards but we will have yet to see how that works.
From a gaming standpoint, NextColony is very slow but also really addictive. I have been spending many hours to play all the aspects of the game and we are still very early on. Many of the features have not been activated yet and it is already such an incredible game. Thanks to blockchain technology, we have several third party tools already, something that would be unthinkable with traditional games. In fact, I am spending more time on @rafalski's amazing interactive map, than in the official frontend of the game.
I have been investing a lot into the game and was luckily able to get most of my investment already back, even before the revenue share started. As NextColony uses a similar technology like Splinterlands, to create digital ownership of transferable items like Ships and Planets, I was able to manually sell some of my battleships for Steem. This business model has collapsed now, as more and more ships are constantly being produced, but eventually I still see demand for my ships, particularly when the honey pot is open and people see the financial possibilities of dominating the game. Ships will become much more interesting, when money floats out of the game.
Possible Earnings: 3/5
I am giving NextColony 3 out of 5 money bags for potential earnings, on a good-will basis, as the revenue share model still has yet to come. However, the game already offers an amazing digital ownership model for planets and ships and is hence a few steps ahead of DrugWars. You can always sell your assets manually, if you find a buyer. Soon enough, there will be marketplaces for the game, making trade much easier. And when the honey pot opens, over 40k Steem are already waiting to be claimed by the players.
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Conclusion
All of the three game leaders on Steem are interesting to play and bring a financial gain for the players. The funny thing is, that this is no competition between the games but they are rather complementing each other and work together in a tandem, where players can play all of them every day and earn with all them, bit by bit, growing their Steem accounts and stake in the game.
I see a golden future for gaming on Steem, as it basically brings all we can ask for to have a proper ecosystem for content creators and consumers. We can post articles, images, videos, live-streams and even monetize all of that in multiple ways. In fact, I do believe we haven't seen nothing yet.
Just got into Steemmonsters and god it's addicting! I was earning around 1 DEC at Bronze 3 but as I play more games and rise in divisions I start earning way more now. Bronze 1 win earns me around 5 DEC now if I beat a higher division opponent 🔥🔥
About Drugwars, I invested around 30 STEEM when the game was first launched and got back at least triple the Steem in less than a month.
I somehow got bored of it to tell you the truth, not my style 🤔🤔
Never tried playing NextColony but as I see people posting tons of positive feedback I think I'll try it out soon 😁😁
Great blog @flauwy , off to play Splinterlands now.
Peace ✌✌
Posted using Partiko Android
Nice breakdown!
I loved your money bags rating system too.
I have been playing drugwars for a few weeks only just started earning future maybe a week ago, it's kind of hard starting out later, unless there is some cooldown after battles or something I am not aware of... I get attacked several times daily.. I'm basically a farm for the older players 😂
I only just got started on nextcolony also... long way to go on that one!
Splinterlands is definitely the jewel of steem in my eyes!
Can't get enough of it. Guilds starting really soon and once the mobile app launches, I think we will have another wave of people onboarding... Make sure you guys stock up on cheap cards before the app launches!
@flauwy Hits us again with his kick ass gaming content! Interesting comparison looking at things from a financial perspective. Pretty awesome that players can have fun and earn with games, the future is bright!
Dear @flauwy
I'm not much into games and I never played any of those mentioned ones.
However I would like to ask you a question: in order to play any of those games - would user need to understand what crypto and blockchain are about? Do they need to purchase STEEM in the first place?
Just curious. Im just wondering if potential userbase for any game on Steem = people who are already on steem.
Finally. All those spammy posts in my opinion damaged thousands of accounts. After all would anyone follow or even visit accounts that is posting so much spammy-looking posts? I hardly doubt so.
ps. I just visited @drugwars profile and I was wondering .... how to start playing that game? There is no website displayed anywhere. Could you help?
One more question: I just signed up to NextColony to try it out. Do they actually use our accounts to post anything on Steemit? Do they post some automatic reports? I hope not. Please advise.
Upvote on the way:)
Yours
Piotr
Users don't need to understand anything about crypto at first. Splinterlands is even having a free delegation system, to assign SP to new players without enough Resource Credits. DrugWars even allows to have no Steem account at all, as far as I know. And NextColony is such a slow game, users can easily familiarize themselves with everything over time, including Steem itself. Particularly Splinterlands will be able to onboard new users via their upcoming mobile app and PayPal payment system.
Spammy posts are annoying but on the other hand are we simply used to the current form of feeds from our followers. It is already diversifying into tribes and special front-ends. Eventually, few will look at the overall Steem feed of a user and rather focus on community feeds. And within each community, everything goes according to the communities rules, including spammy posts, if they wish so.
I cannot say much about DrugWar. I started way back and never got the hang of it because I don't like the "thug theme". Also, they have integrated tons of new features just recently and I haven't had time to get into it. Like I wrote in the article, I think it has become much better and they devs are trying their best to make the game better. My favorites are clearly Splinterlands and NextColony.
NextColony is not using anything from your account and works with Steem Keychain. That means, they NEVER get access to your account in the first place, as the private key never leaves your local computer. Different story when you use Steem Connect instead but even then you don't have to fear any posting whatsoever.
Dear @flauwy
Thank you for your kind and prompt reply. Appreciate it.
Seriously amazing comment.
ps.
Since you're so responsive, I thought that perhaps I could share with you my latest publication and ask about your own opinion on discussed subject:
"DID OUR WORLD LEADERS JUST PUSH GLOBAL RECESSION AWAY from our doorsteps?"
https://www.steemit.com/economy/@crypto.piotr/did-our-world-leaders-just-push-global-recession-away-from-our-doorsteps
I would appreciate it greately.
Yours
Piotr
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