Splinterlands is a card battling game, similar to Magic the Gathering, built on the Hive Blockchain.
The general idea is you buy cards (summoners and monsters) and then select a team (one summoner, up to six monsters depending on ‘mana’ and then you battle an opponent.
The Splinterlands Market Place looks like this….
If you win the battle, you get points and prizes, and rise up the leaderboard, and the higher up you finish, the more prizes you get at the end of every season (which lasts 16 days).
And you can see an example of a battle here:
The company was founded about four years ago by two independent individuals who go by the names of @aggroed and @yapabmatt on Hive.
Their account on Hive is here – @splinterlands.
It is one of the biggest business success stories in the crypto industry and also very successful by the standards of the online gaming industry as a whole.
NB – this is THE MOST POPULAR crypto game by a long way, with an active user base of over 7000 and market valuation in the several millions of dollars.
All of this has been done from the ground up, with the two founders employing dozens of people to code and market the game, and setting up a clever rewards system in-game to encourage people to invest in cards to play the game. The top players make a living out of playing!
AND UNLIKE WITH MAINSTREAM GAMING – IF YOU BUY CARDS TO PLAY THE GAME, YOU OWN THE ASSETS, YOU CAN SELL THEM TO OTHER PLAYERS.
This is one of the most empowering initiatives in the history of gaming and blockchain, truly decentralised, truly inspiring, truly innovative – there are several developments ongoing… the game is EVOLVING.
The Splinterlands team have made active use of Twitter, being careful NOT to break any of its rules, but recently this: they have had their account suspended..
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Why is Twitter censoring this small business from advertising?
It can’t be an anti-crypto thing because it allows all sorts of crypt content.
From a broadly Marxist perspective on the Media, this is a case of Twitter gatekeeping out, or censoring alternatives to the mainstream gaming sector – in mainstream gaming you have to pay to play and you don’t OWN anything, you the little guy cannot profit from gaming (expect for the very elite few who becoming pro-gamers).
But Splinterlands shows us a different model – it is based around individuals OWNING AND CONTROLLING the direction the game takes – in a few days time, Splinterlands is going to start airdropping governance tokens based on how much you’ve already Vested into the game, and these tokens will allow players to have a say in future developments.
Just think about HOW DIFFERENT that is from mainstream gaming or mainstream media.
Could it be that Twitter just can’t handle genuine individual autonomy and decentralisation?
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