I never ended up playing Splinterlands even though I mention it a lot in relation to the success of HIVE. I'm just personally not into that type of game.

Its unfortunate that happened to you on the previous affiliate program. That same thing has happened to me several times with affiliate programs outside of crypto. It's almost common practice unfortunately because once certain dominating affiliates get their sales funnels set up it becomes a huge gravy train and at some point the companies don't want to pay out to it anymore.