Hello steemians,

20 days ago, I wrote an article about Steem Monsters and how it brings its own "positive revolution" across the game market.

My first article did not say enough about the game and could not be a complete review. I'll write more about this in a short time - but I believe the investment part could also use some facts!

Now we are 20 days after, and I did some digging.

I tracked stats, I crunched numbers, I made my own database and extracted some more information on my own. There are very interesting numbers I will share with you at the end of this article.

Question is, does the market of Steem Monsters go up, or down?

Is the investment proving positive shortterm, or longterm?
Or is it not going positive at all?

This is the information I looked for!

And I'll cover that up. But for people stranger to all this, let's first explain: why is there a demand in this market, or a market to begin with?

Is there a market? And why?

.

Current goldfoil market available at peakmonsters

And a market is also available ingame on Steem Monsters!

First a few basics. Steem Monsters (which has been rebranded as Splinterlands because you can now purchase with Steem but also other currencies) is a collectable card game, so called CCG, where you put up one summoner and up to six monsters against your enemy.

Each battle has its own variation of mana, colors allowed and special rules, making for varied fights with their own nasty surprises.

The winner goes up in ranking and league, which gives him large card rewards every season. I'll earn sixty more cards today, because the season ends and I am on Diamond I, but the best players get much more, thanks to more than a hundred card and also dozens of free boosters.

Top Leaderboard awards - where the veterans get their profit!

The winner of a fight also possibly completes part of his daily quest, and completing it will give him further rewards. Take a look at this daily I had last week on April 10th :D

One of my latest dailies was great.
It has 2 Rare cards, 1 Epic, 1 Legendary, and even two goldfoil cards!
This set is several bucks of value in goldfoil cards and legendary cards.

Even more, there are tournaments every day where the best players get out with real money, in STEEM or other rewards.

Winning there can reap great benefits (up to 1500 to 2000 USD a month, as mentioned here already ). I know I know, I talked about it previously.

The cards are in finite number (at some point the only way to get them will be at the market - this did not happen yet while the game is in beta, but it could in about one year) and to level them up you need more of the same card. This means that in order to have a max level card you must find many copies of it - in booster packs or at the market.

And this is what I wanted to get to. We can understand why there is "strong demand" for a given card. It is to increase its level.

You reached Silver League? good, then it's time to see if you can find a Level 4 Summoner. Reached gold League? time for an update! Reached Diamond? Congrats! but now everyone against you can play max-level cards. Do you have any? And do you have what would be critical to your deck?

You really must not take this as a negative prospect; you don't need to be the #1 player in one day, or one week, or at all. It's a strategy game, and it's great fun to check your deck, upgrade things and battle up.

Most of all you only need to complete your dailies and reach the season rank you are comfortable with. You will get rewards every season to get better. The better you are, the further up you will get, and the more free cards you will get at the end of the season.

You looted cards which are not what you were looking for? then you can sell them - and trade them for dollars that you can use to purchase other cards.

Ok. But why do we say we invest?

.
Steem Monsters / Splinterlands is based on the STEEM blockchain but allows many other currencies for purchases and sales.

Suppose that like many people reading steemit you have crypto sitting somewhere, and instead of day-trading (or in addition to it) you need to diversify your activity, holdings and expectations.

If you take a Steem Monster card, you convert some crypto into a traceable asset, that can increase in value and later be sold back.

Now, it's okay, you know you can do it.
The most important question is:
"Shall you do it? Or not?"

This is where it gets interesting.

First of all this is something I usually would not recommend in a game - because a game is tied to its studio, its team, and usually its publisher for being used. If it's not used then it loses value. I tested some other cryptogames lately that I would not recommend despite being there, and I also recommend to always be wise in your diversification choices.

You need to know first if this asset is durable.
You need to know if this market is liquid (meaning you can sell an asset to get your money back).
And you need to know if it is gaining value.

Do some cards have volatile value (meaning you can trade them for profit), which can interest some of you more, or are they actually stable.

You need to determine the "opportunity cost" meaning whether it's good to invest there, instead of trying to make money somewhere else. You'll make your own choice about this - it is very important - but I can provide you with some information and numbers below.

The game is durable and has trust

.
The team is solid, the game is very well funded, and any support request I had was answered within minutes. I covered that already previously. All indicators here are in the green and there is no publisher able to pull the plug, which is even better.

The game has a so open API and packets that anyone could rerun the game should it fall in the next years.

As a game developer myself, I can say it sincerely: I think Steem Monster / Splinterlands is here for a dozen years.

Now we need to look into the live card market. This is where the money is going, and where your cards can be too.

First of all the market is in SBD - Steem dollars. At any given time a card costing 1 USD will cost more or less STEEM, but the displayed price of a given card is still 1 USD. Seeing it is still at 1 USD, gives trust and reliability in the system. And it makes it compatible with other cryptocurrencies too (such as TRX) as long as they can be compared to a USD value. I think this is a good point.

It also has one of the best communities I have seen, if not the best I experienced. Last week my son lost a game in a tournament. His enemy had a really strong deck and cards my son could not hope to have himself. Hearing this, the winner actually gave him twenty cards (for several bucks of immediate value!) to reward him for getting there.

In what PVP game can you hope for your enemies to send you such gifts? I know none! There is currently such sportmanship and generosity you'll feel welcome.

But we must dig deeper.

What are the actual numbers?

.

Here I get to the part that I find the most interesting.

Based on the numbers I extracted for the whole card database over a single month:
and by comparing the average value of a card over the course of a month, and the same card base value yesterday on April 14th.

In total, two thirds of all cards (66%) had a price increase.

52 % of total Steem Monster cards increased by more than 10 % in value, and half of them (26 %) by more than 25 %.

Only 10 % cards had a significant price decrease of more then one tenth.

66 % of all cards also have more demand than offers in a given month, meaning they have more sales than new offer listings.

Nearly half of all cards (47 %) also have a good liquidity, meaning they are sold at least every day on average. It would be great if this number could go up.

You may think that these goilfoil legendary cards at 350 USD are never sold? But they sometimes are! Some sales of the last month were for 250 USD, 300 USD or even 350 USD. I suppose that person wanted to use that card in goldfoil tournaments and knows that it could be traded again later (and possibly for even more USD!).

I would like to speak more about the liquidity of this market.

As mentioned by the developer, current liquidity is at 2500 USD every day (so 75 000 USD a month), for 2000 daily active users. SimilarWeb also confirms an increase in visitors to 220K / month (50 % increase from last month) so daily users could very well increase.

Number of website visitors is getting even better. And average time is 26 minutes per visit! This is huge!

But I gathered other numbers too which are actually quite favorable, with more than 23400 more sales than new offer listings over the last month.

More users will mean much more demand as they need to upgrade many of their cards as they go up.

With these positive numbers in mind I feel confident that my investment in Steem Monsters is going up!

My thanks go to the dev team - go for it guys! and bring us more people! :D

Take his article as encouragement!

And for other players, I hope this article helped you find where your value currently is and how it is behaving.

If you are interested, I could make it a monthly report. And I'll be the first to inform us too if something in the market is going wrong.

So don't hesitate to try the game!

It's here for years I think, so you can wait if you want, but the sooner you'll get in, the more cards and legendaries you will get. My links have a referral link (the ref=XXX) but feel free to remove it if you feel like it was not helping you so much.

Cheers guys and enjoy your battles!