Splinterlands | Reason I Voted NO on The Market Fees Proposal!

costanza (69)in #splinterlands • last year

Another Proposal was put up this week for Splinterlands. This time it involves the Market fees for buying or renting cards and I voted No on it for these reasons...

Respecing Vote Outcomes

While I voted No also on the proposal to move all bots to Wild League where I generally play, that proposal got passed and I'm perfectly fine with that. If anything I would say everyone votes how they want and the outcome needs to be respected. The same goes for this proposal to change the market Fee Structure.

Revamp Market Fees to Include 2% DAO Royalty Proposal
So basically this proposal increases the fees that need to be paid to use the marketplace (for buys, rentals, ...) from 5% to 6% with less going toward 3rd party websites. The entire proposal can be read here (Link)

Why I voted NO !
My main reason for voting no is the fees going up from 5% which I already consider really high to 6%. The entire purpose of the proposal is to lock more DEC this time inside of the DAO so the flywheel gets in effect sooner.

I have never been a fan of this Flywheen narrative ad believe SPS should get more actual use cases instead of this mechanism that one day in the future will start kicking in and burning SPS. There is always somewhat of a conflicting agenda from the Splinterlands team to earn revenue to keep going as their costs of operation with many employees is quite high. This indirectly always comes at the cost of player earnings. Reward cards became Soulbound which is fun but in reality really cuts deep into the earnings, more cards are also always printed while no real new players are coming in at the moment so everyone gets inflated

So if anything it is in the interest of the team for the Price of DEC to go up as nobody would buy packs from the upcoming Rebellion expansion with credits as DEC is cheaper. The team also has a ton of DEC to potentially sell as company profit. All this focus on getting DEC to peg has no real short-term impact on the game and the adoption but should for sure do something in the long run.

One of the difficulties with Play2Earn games is that when there is some adoption, everyone wants in at the same time causing boom & bust cycles. Right now the demand clearly isn't there with close to 11k out of 16k Promo cards still unsold. This shows the lack of demand and if Rebellion would come out in the coming months it likely would be a massive let down in terms of sales as these promo cards used to sell out in a matter of time.

Right now with 6 days left to go 39% of the votes are against it and the proposal isn't passing.

One of the side effects of increasing the tax also might be that more players start looking for ways to totally bypass them which can't be that hard as it's easy to just send from one account to another. It must be possible to write some code that allows players to buy or sell cards without any of the 6% fees.

What Needs To Happen
Basically more players need to come into the ecosystem right now and the way this can happen is either by making the game so good and accessible that real games actually start adopting it, or for the earnings (SPS) to skyrocket so it becomes worth for most to play and invest into the game. That would mean at least a 5x or more so for SPS. Prices going up in the first place were the major catalyst for the first real adoption wave. This mostly was a side effect of DEC being included in the airdrop which now is still a problem that needs to get fixed. So basically the only real thing to do for the team is to keep building making the game better and giving SPS and DEC more use case while making sure they cut their costs as much as possible so they don't have to flood the market with a ton more cards.

Conclusion
I see much more downside than upside in Increasing the market Fees and don't think the system right now is broken to the extent that it needs a change. The main narrative continues to be the Flywheel which I have never been a big fan of. For those reasons, I'm voting NO on this latest Proposal!