If the whole steemsports team were to be paid from the daily rewards, it would be more profitable for us to quit steemsports and go work @ mcdonalds for 1hr each and enjoy the rest of the day.
Free games have a place and time, and currently they are helping us bootsrap SteemSports (amongst other things, such as providing a faucet and driving engagement).
However, the only way how SS can win in the long term is if we can build something that can attract thousands of players from the outside of steem community that is willing to play real money games. That requires time and capital, and because SteemSports is based on STEEM, its user acquisition is also STEEM user acquisition.
More users on STEEM + demand for STEEM and SBD are a net positive side effect on the long term.
Perhaps we did a bad job of communicating our vision. SteemSports of yesterday is completely unsustainable, and it was never intended to be the final product. We are working hard on making SteemSports real, and no - we are not getting rich of the rewards pool. It merely gives us some bootstraping power to fuel future growth, as well as drives user engagement / marketing in the interim.
We are building an app that is a more user friendly frontend to the STEEM blockchain for these types of games. The Beta is out already. We create high quality content that may hold some SEO value and bring new users to steemit.com trough search engines. The voting mechanism, if working correctly, is supposed to reward this.
We are experimenting our way into a product market fit. We have built traction and following already. We know there are thousands more people out there that we will eventually serve.