Why Does The Promo Event Sold Lower Than Expected?

in #hive-1332323 hours ago

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Hello there! @saydie here, playing Splinterlands everyday!

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With the Auction Event finally over, marks the end of the Promo event which started with the Hall Of Legends Event that @sps.dao has paid SMC 600M DEC for the development of promo cards under the Proposal #155. Overall, the two events was a success for selling a total of 719,454,900 DEC giving the DAO 119,454,900 DEC profit from their investment. However, the talk was that the previous promo events has sold for about 200M DEC and with the event having 5 Phases, it could lock up as much as a Billion DEC but even after the addition of the Auction, we are still 280M DEC short from the projected sales. What are the potential reasons why the promo event has sold lower than expected. That is what I will try to figure out on this post.

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By the way, the goal of this post was not to throw shade to matt and the team but to help figure out how we can improve things cause I expect that it will not that be the last time that we will have a promo event as big as this one in the future.

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Promo Event Breakdown

The Hall of Legends promo event which is part of the original proposal was divided into 5 separate phase which is expected to generate 200M DEC for each phase or 1 Billion DEC for the entire event based on the previous promo events held but at the end of the event, it only has managed to sold 576,629,000 DEC so if we exclude the 142,825,900 DEC sales from the Auction Event, we are 23,371,000 DEC short of the 600M DEC that the DAO paid SMC. To have a better idea how the sales go through, below is a breakdown of sales for each phase and how many BCX were printed for each promo card.

Card Sales
Hall of legends Phase 1113,683,000 DEC
Hall of legends Phase 2142,832,000 DEC
Hall of legends Phase 396,220,000 DEC
Hall of legends Phase 4106,608,000 DEC
Hall of legends Phase 5117,286,000 DEC
Auction House142,825,900 DEC
Total Sales719,454,900 DEC


Looking at each phase of the event, none has managed to reach 200M DEC. To me, this is not a good sign and I think that we should be more thoughtful about the terms of the deal before we agree into it. On the other hand, the results of the Auction was more or less within my expectation since 100 cards can only generate as much based on how they were valued by their owners.

Printed Cards
Car NameRegular FoilGold FoilTotal BCX
Sanctus Vicar11,264 BCX597 BCX11,861 BCX
Elanor Bravefoot1,487 BCX75 BCX1,562 BCX
Night Stalker24,449 BCX1,245 BCX25,694 BCX
Delya1,252 BCX63 BCX1,315 BCX
Rune Arcanist9,180 BCX460 BCX9,640 BCX
Riklauniman1,287 BCX59 BCX1,346 BCX
Meriput Mossmender15,233 BCX803 BCX16,036 BCX
Nephket1,112 BCX58 BCX1,170 BCX
Warborn Shaman12,371 BCX640 BCX13,012 BCX
Fizbo the Fabulous1,487 BCX78 BCX1,565 BCX
Heloise the Hollow95 BCX5 BCX100 BCX

Source: Splintercards

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Factors That Could Affect the Promo Sales

🔸 Low Player Base

It's an undeniable fact that we have lower player base now compared to the previous years which may have affected the promo sales like if we just have double the player base that we have now and half of them want to invest to the project, we can easily hit the 1 Billion DEC in sales. On the other hand, we will soon have our big marketing campaign with the goal of increasing our player base.

🔸 Reduced Leaderboard Prize

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Before this promo event, the last event we have was the Bilcoin Halving Promo Event in celebration of Bitcoin Halving and if we compare them, The Bitcoin Event has printed more cards than any of the Hall Of Legends phase, given Baron Fyatt was only sold for 31,250 DEC per BCX which is cheaper than any of the legendary promo card that is sold for 50k DEC but when we look at Henchling Enforcer, it has sold for 3,125 DEC which is higher than any of the rare promo card but still printed more copies.

Car NameRegular FoilGold FoilTotal BCX
Henchling Enforcer30,794 BCX1,518 BCX31,048 BCX
Baron Fyatt6,421 BCX299 BCX6,597 BCX


Why do I think that they sold more? I think that is because on the previous event, the team is providing additional prices such as land plots, card packs and Runi. Furthermore, the top 20 leaderboard spots receives additional copies of cards as well as titles for the top 200 leaderboard spots. Meanwhile, the rewards for Hall of Legends are only titles for the top 500 leaderboard spots. I don't necessary dislike it because with less rewards, players will buy only the cards they need.

🔸 Short Event Timeframe

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Based on the proposal, the promo event will run for around 6 months with the first phase to start at September 3rd that goes for two weeks before it rotates out and another two weeks time before it follows the second phase. Should the time frame be longer, it could provide players more breathing ground to save more money to spend specially for smaller players that has limited resources to spend in the game.

🔸 Rebellion FOMO

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If we look on the Hall of Legends sales breakdown, we can see that, Phase 3 has the lowest number of sales with only 96,220,000 DEC worth of sales but by any means, I do not think that it was because the cards were weak or anything. The reason why I think that it has a much lower sales was due to the end of the Rebellion sale that some players rather spend on the Rebellion packs than to purchase the Phase 3 promo cards.

🔸 Card Pricing

Could the pricing of the pricing of the cards be reduced, we may be able to have a higher sales as it makes more affordable for smaller players and to make that possible, the team could just chance the rarity of cards to common and epic rarity so even if the price of the card is lower, players will still need to purchase more copies of the card.

🔸 Card Design and Balancing

Another I could think of why the event has lower than expected sales was due to the balancing of some of the promo cards. In particular, with the last legendary promo card Fizbo the Babulous.

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In terms, of the art, I think it has the worst among all of the Hall of Legends cards but I do not necessarily mind it as its looks fits just right for its lore but the major issue that many players have with this card is that at level 3, it has 99% of its value, giving them no reason to max the card. Like for spending and additional 250k DEC to max the card, the only thing that they will get is an additional magic damage. Furthermore, while it has a new ability called Deflection Shroud that gives the Deflection ability on adjacent units, making it another Earth element unit that only makes Eternal Tofu more powerful instead of moving it to other element , removing any semblance of balancing to the game.

🔸 Maintenance Hindering Auction Sales

The team conducting weekly maintenance just shows how much they want to provide a good product to its players but I do not know why the maintenance needs to make all pages of the game offline, particularly the Auction page that prevents players to bid during the down time, particularly with the last maintenance which lasted for 6 hours. By the time that the maintenance was over, the auction has also supposed to end but was extended by 1 hour which I think was very short extension. For one, not every player are on discord or that they are in the middle of work or sleep which may result to potential bidders to miss the announcement.

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At the end of the auction, the last gold foil Heloise the Hollow was sold for 9,123,456 DEC by @yabapmatt but does the Auction extended for a longer time, we may be able to see the price goes for more than 10M DEC.

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Closing

At the end o the day, the DAO has still profited with this event but I was just hoping more from it to generate more demand for DEC. Since the event was already over, the only thing we can do is to reflect on the event and think for things that could be done to make future events more successful. For those that have participated, I hope that you were happy with the cards that you have and the rewards that you get from the leaderboard.

Thank you and see you at the next post.

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To add to your post, to me the main reasons these promos sold less were:

  1. We had 2 ongoing promo events with the hall of legends and auction. The auction certainly distracted the whales from the hall of legends.

  2. More important than the first one, it's not just about the 2 events running at the same time. It's the number of expensive promo cards all so close together. It's one thing to run a promo event with 1 or maybe 2 cards. It's another to run 11 promo cards in the span of 4 months.

  3. No extra prizes (other than titles) certainly contributed to less sales compared to the Halving event, although that's probably a good thing.

  4. The price of these cards was certainly very expensive for "regular players", or non whales.

  5. The combination of all of these probably left the non whales feeling like they couldn't keep up. It certainly did that for me. I am one of the many players who "got burned" from CL but I still invested some in Rebellion. I don't have everything but I have most of the key cards. However, seeing that a bunch of legendaries at 50k DEC per copy plus the rares and Heloise, buying one or two felt meaningless and I would still be unable to compete with those who got all of them.

We have less than 100 people that participated on the auction event and most of them likely have enough copy of the Hall of legends cards so that does not factor by much in terms of sales but the short timeframe for buying expensive cards certainly burned out many people. Don't know why they shorten the even to 4 months since the timeframe in the proposal was 6 months but even that was still very short.

For the whales it doesn't factor (although I saw Vugtis saying that he probably should have bought more copies of Rik) but it matters for the other players. It would have been one thing to sell 1 promo card at 50k DEC per BCX. It would still be expensive but players could still feel like they were remaining competitive if they bought it. When those players see 2 cards but they are 2 of many, they might opt not to get anything. That was the case for me. Others might still want to buy but their budget doesn't allow for everything.

I think we should learn our lessons from this and expect fewer sales per card and not accept so many cards at once. Rebellion has 17 promo cards! CL has 8, which includes Runi. Untamed has 3, Beta has 6, and Alpha has 4. Rebellion has the same number of promo cards that CL, Untamed, and Beta have together. While it doesn't have a mini set, Conclave Arcana is getting released sooner because there's no mini set, so that shouldn't factor into consideration. In fact, that also results in a smaller time frame for those 17 promo cards than the one the 3 Untamed promos or the 8 CL promos had.