<div class="text-justify">

We are at the end of the season for Splinterlands and it is a good time to have a look at the rental markets for my account. Especially since at the end of this month, the tokenomics and rewards model are changing, so it will set a good baseline to evaluate the future. 


![image.png](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/tarazkp/23xyjxHo2sgTme776ydAEMi673UiuUSVtLc1S6d9ndkdgxDbhiDtJWgHhy1dcNvzfge2Y.png)


I have split my cards across two accounts to make it a little easier to sort through my playing cards and my hold cards. What would be a nice feature in @peakmonsters (@jarvie) would be a way to mark cards "for play" like a favorite, that can be included or excluded through filters. I haven't found a good way to do this. 

![image.png](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/tarazkp/23tGXzN7KjRWhEXhUcYXgBdZtUGcd8hwaUnKbUFZYgggSGB3CUiPbH4JtxzqrsfuhVsGR.png)
![image.png](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/tarazkp/23tGY56DLpkbE74YcDiv7a5uesCtDen2rmDp4in68Cj6ozWRqYTHrLvhQzo7bAA5QT658.png)

>These are filtered for all rented.

As you can see, everything I put for rent got rented for a total of about 41,000 DEC, which has a street value of 93 HIVE or if you prefer - $44 US. That isn't too bad!  Granted, there is $41K in cards on rent there, which means that it is about 1000 DEC per $1000 worth or, around 0.1% return on this particular day - which would mean that if pushed out to the approximate 22 seasons a year, the EOS days would give a return of 2% a year - of course, the other 15 days of the season are not like this, which is why there is a discrepancy in reality and the yROA. However, the return is pretty decent and I estimate that it is probably closer to 8-10% a year on the holdings, depending on the value of the assets being calculated, as this fluctuates with card price.

While during the season I do very little in terms of renting at all (I should be more active), at the end of each season I enjoy the "maximization" process when I have the time. Not because it makes that much difference to the *bottom line,* but because it is fun to see the numbers ticking around and trying to guess "price points" for cards. I don't have that much time to spend doing it, but enough to adjust here and there. 

As someone who is generally not that much of a fan of maximization of "reward" what I think is good to note is that the *gamification* aspect of this type of activity attracts many types of people. They are games embedded into the game and creates a variation in process that improves the overall game experience. The other thing to note is that this "game" is played on an interface that isn't owned by the game itself, as I am playing on Peakmonsters - which is interesting in and of itself.  

What ends up happening is that more time is spent in the Splinterlands ecosystem, which is something that can be a challenge for platforms to accomplish. Sure, this breaks up the Alexa rankings, but personally I think people put too much faith in that nonsense, because SEO and Alexa are geared towards the advertising model of the internet, which is not the path that crypto is encouraging. 

There are some people who put a lot of time and effort into driving the SEO narrative for Hive, but I think that it is less effectual than they believe, especially since the Hive platform is designed to be highly fragmented across many interfaces, communities and second-layer experiences. Have they missed that this is a decentralized platform that isn't reliant on the highly manipulative advertising model that restricts and punishes users on all the centralized platforms that rely on advertising revenue? Why would we want that as a focus here?

Advertising does have its place of course, but once reliant on it as a revenue stream, it starts to heavily affect the incentives and as a result, the creator and user base suffers, even if the owners of the site are reaping massive rewards. When it comes to decentralized ownership for example on Hive, the revenue from advertising is not going to be significant enough to make an impact on most holders' incomes, but will impact negatively on experience. 

For example, @peakmonsters takes a cut on sales and rentals, yet people don't mind as long as the experience of using it is good. If they start plastering advertisements all over the interface and rely on that income at the expense of user experience, many users will go elsewhere or, because this is an opensource blockchain, create a rival service.

No one is bound to using Peakmonsters and for example, Monstermarket is another interface that enables the buying and selling of cards and uses a different business model structure. This possibility of interface mobility is vital for the health of the decentralized ecosystem, because it means that if any one service gets too greedy, they will rapidly lose userbase, because there is little to no cost to make the shift. This isn't the same with streaming services for example, because people are "invested" into particular content or even hardware to support one. Changing means "losing", and no one likes to lose. 

*Mobility* is a key factor of crypto and it isn't just the ability to have decentralized nodes for protection, it also drives protection for the user from the business models involved. There is the very real possibility of, *if you don't like it, build one you do like* in crypto, which we have seen unfold over the last 2.5 years of Hive's existence, after forking from Steem. The *game* is stronger here, because the community is highly engaging, making it compelling to stay, but still not requiring to be tied to any one interface, game or tokenization model. This creates for a user-driven dynamic, rather than the force-fed approach of the centralized platforms that are bound to deliver what makes their shareholders wealthier.

The return on investment for me on Splinterlands is not great so far, compared to what I have put into it due to my timing, but that doesn't mean I don't enjoy the many layers of the game and perhaps one day - the ROI will arrive.


Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]


</div>

Posted Using [LeoFinance <sup>Beta</sup>](https://leofinance.io/@tarazkp/games-within-games)