What Splinterlands and NFT Games ACTUALLY are? Investments? Work? Or just... Games?

What Splinterlands and NFT Games ACTUALLY are? Investments? Work? Or just... Games?

As I've already wrote several times here on Hive, I have been closely following the rise of NFT games. I love the idea of being able to freely sell and buy gaming stuff, and I even wrote my Law thesis about the ownership of in-game assets through the usage of the blockchain (and unshamefully plugged Splinterlands and Hive on it a few times 😅).

But the reality is, usually, not as good as we dreamed of.

Why I'm saying that?

Because no one is able to answer (including me) what NFT Games ACTUALLY are.

What is the core idea of NFT Games? Who is the target audience for them?

If you see NFT Games as INVESTMENTS, all assets have to give some kind of return. Otherwise, why would someone invest on that? But if everyone's having a profit, who's paying the bill?

In the real world, investments (eg treasury bonds or shares of a company) have yields because someone IS paying the bill. The government is paying interests on your bonds (and collecting money from the taxpayer), or the consumers of a company are buying stuff from that company, allowing the company to make a profit (and share a % of that profit with you, the shareholder).

In a NFT Game like Splinterlands, where the money is coming from? From other players that are purchasing the in-game assets, you may say. But WHY those other players are purchasing those assets? To have a profit, just like yourself. And how they'll have a profit? It's not sustainable.

OK, so let's suppose that Splinterlands and other NFT Games are NOT an investment: in fact, they're WORK!

You put in hours of work (you click on stuff, learn how to optimize, jump through the ropes, whatever) and receive some sort of payment to compensate for the time you spent and for the effort you had.

In Splinterlands, for example, you have to put a lot of effort to receive rewards. First, you have to spend a lot of time to learn how to be good at the game (not only understand the rules and the mechanics, but actually create good teams with combos and synergies that make sense). Then you have to login regularly on the game, spend a lot of time playing all your Ranked battles (finding an opponent, then building your team, then waiting for your opponent to build his team, then watch/skip the replay, then start over and over again).

But... are NFT Games really trying to be a second work? The earning/hour of Splinterlands is peanuts: unless you're very lucky and hit a jackpot, the $/hour a player makes is negligible when compared to almost any kind of "real world job", unless we're talking about really, really poor countries with almost no job opportunities. But if you're in the European Union, in the US, or even in some developing countries, just going outside and doing 1 hour of menial work is going to make you way more money than playing the game for 1 hour and then selling whatever rewards you got on your daily chests.

Finally, we have our last option: NFT Games are just Games! Yey, fun stuff! I love gaming, don't ya?

But there's a huge flaw here: NFT Games just aren't fun as other regular, non-NFT games.

See, I like Splinterlands. I really do. I enjoy playing the game. I enjoy reading about Splinterlands strategies, finding out powerful combos to destroy my enemies. I'm not trying to pointlessly criticize the game, or just talk shit about it for the lulz.

But, definitely, Splinterlands isn't my favorite game. There are dozens, hundreds, of more entertaining games to be played.

There are better way better games in any of those categories. Just looking at the 20 most played games on Steam, there are about 10 or 15 games that I would prefer to play instead of any NFT Game, if we're talking only about the entertaining value.

What I'm trying to say is: if you were going to be on an isolated island for 1 month and could bring only one game to play there, would you bring Splinterlands, Axie Infinity, Gods Unchained or Alien Worlds? I doubt that there's a single human alive that would.

So... what NFT Games actually are?

If they're investments, they're not good investments.

If they're work, they're very badly-paid work.

If they're games, they're just not fun as other games.

Thanks for reading this post, and until next time!

If you enjoyed the post, feel free to follow me as I'm routinely writing about Gaming, Investment, Fitness and Literature, and posting about other random fun subjects like Travel, Photography and Metal Detecting!

If you want to play fun NFT Games, I do strongly recommend 🃏Splinterlands, 🤖TerraCore, ⭐RisingStar and 🌿dCrops. Send me a message if you need help starting out!

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This is definitely NOT financial, legal or investment advice. You wouldn't get your financial advice from a squirrel, would you? Cryptocurrencies are very volatile, so don't invest what you can't afford to lose.
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