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Some Thoughts on Overcapacity in the Splinterlands Market (revisited)

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@imno
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I have two posts that I'm working on right now but I wanted to revisit this one.

This is a copy and paste of a post I wrote 5 months ago when Splinterlands was booming and everyone believed there was a supply shortage that needed to be solved with a CL dump of 15 million packs.

During this time period I had person after person telling me we needed more cards and cheaper prices and I continually said lower prices would hurt the game and we already had a supply glut but it was just hidden away from public view. Well before CL even dropped the rental market was getting trashed, dec and SPS were falling by the day and new player growth had been stuck for months.

Notice the comments at the bottom. Both saying growth to deal with the supply glut was on its way. The thing is they should have both been right but two things happened to stop it:

  1. They attacked new users instead of tackling the bot problem. (no one saw this coming)

  2. Asset prices stopped appreciating and the rental market fell causing a loss of interest to potential new players. (exactly what I was warning about with the supply glut hurried along by #1)

Those two things left player growth stagnant for the last 4 months. And the funny thing is that when I talk about the mistakes the devs have made that stagnated player growth the new narrative I'm answered with over and over again is that player growth could never have been expected to continue past what it did. Well, here's two very smart people in the comments telling me player growth should be expected to continue.

Anyway, here's the post. I'll link the original at the bottom.

Some Thought On Overcapacity In The Splinterlands Market Revisited

When the rental market got started, many of the whales decided to dip a toe in. I think they knew that the full force of their portfolios going in the market would just smother it.

Over the past few days, we are seeing two things happening. First, the whales are starting to get in a little past their toefins.

Second, there are tons of new accounts coming in that are just buying walls of inventory and dropping it on the markets at ridiculously low prices.

It's a wake up call to something I've actually been awake to for a while now but many people still don't believe.

Even with all of the new people in splinterlands and the massive price increases, Splinterlands still has an overcapacity of cards that would probably take another 5x new accounts from here to fill.

While some cards have become scarce, even cards I've pointed to over and over again for their scarcity like Furious Chicken which now only has 1 for every 7 accounts and is probably the most popular card played, still has over 2100 of them sitting dormant on the rental market while the price that shot all the way to $50 is now back down to $27 because a few hundred onto the market.

Most cards in Splinterlands are just sitting dormant in whale accounts who can't do anything with them because a few units crush prices on the sales markets (and therefore the sales momentum) and most rental markets are just holding on under the huge amount of inventory that's already there.

Even Llamakron's price has been pushed way down from where it was by just a little bit more inventory rolling onto the rental markets.

And if you're thinking this is good for the markets, because it brings in more buyers, you'd be wrong. Increasing prices brings in more buyers. People don't buy assets that are dropping in price. Even in games. Scarcity drives growth and the best sign of scarcity for our tiny human minds is seeing prices rise.

Take a look at this chart of recent sales since we've seen this inventory dump start up a few days ago. It peaked and right at that peak people came running in to sell new (old) inventory from their old accounts and look what's happened card sales since. Both the amount of cards and the dollar amounts are dropping.

I say this only because there are a lot of people out there lobbying for Chaos Legion to have 10x the cards Untamed had because they see prices as too high. But high prices cause higher prices. And lower prices cause crashes and loss of interest. Scarcity breeds growth. Over-abundance creates disinterest.

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