Splinterlands | 2026 Predictions

Each Year, I try to make some predictions around Splinterlands While I look back at how previous predictions played out. So today, I'm breaking down what I think the Game will do in 2026...

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2025 Review

Depending on how you look at it, you can say that last year was either a good or a bad year for Splinterlands. Contrary to the general expectation that there was going to be another altseason, it never came and many of the existing Web3 Games completely closed shop while Splinterlands is still going which on it's own is a massive achievement. The development also continues and we got quite some new things in 2025.

However, the core issues pretty much remain the same that there are no real new players despite all efforts and both asset and token prices continue to be in a race to the bottom while they continue to be inflated at a rapid pace.

The card market cap went flat in 2025, which actually means that prices continued to go down as more cards came into circulation. They also added the Black Foil cards which hold a lot more value and part of the reward card became tradable again. At the same time, I'm sure quite some Chaos Legion cards were burned. Overall it's safe to day that everyone who was invested into cards, saw their value decline again by a fair amount even though it feels like the massive bleeding somewhat has stopped.

The bleeding of the SPS Value also was fairly limited around -19% on the year which I would say beats the general Altcoin market and especially the Crypto Gaming market. At the same time in previous years when other alts went up, SPS went down drastically (-78% in 2024)

SPS 2025 Chart

DEC 2025 Chart

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Last Year Predictions

My predictions of what was going to happen in 2025 can be found here.

Prediction #1: Fun Gameplay will be more vital in 2025 to get adoption.

I guess everyone will blame the lack of altseason as the reason why Splinterlands got nearly no adoption and while this certainly is a factor, I still see the lack of fun gameplay for new and existing players as one of the core problems. In 2025, I barely played any splinterlands myself as there is nothing really to do. I don't want to throw away my money and time to be forced to grind Modern for hours each day while my archmage bot running in Wild makes splinterlands just a 'card management' game. I only still play brawls manually but on multiple occasions I just failed to fill my battles as I totally forget. Splinterlands now is just a game where you run a bot and open some rewards and nothing more unless you care about land.

I think this was a correct prediction as Splinterlands really just needs a way for new and existing players to come in and have the most fun possible without the need for a crazy money and time investement in a way where everyone is on a fair level playing field and where thins are not too complicated.

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Prediction #2: Bot Armies will exploit Survival Mode.

Survival Mode right now is down to be reworked and it can't be said that it was a major success. While I would not say that it was exploited by bot armies, 95% of survival mode were just bots running to get some more SPS reward that came from inflation. It can be said that it would be more efficient if cards just needed to be locked to get rewards which makes survival meaningless.

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Prediction #3: Advertising Efforts will be a Waste of Money.

While I don't really have exact numbers on how much was thrown at Advertisement (I don't think it was that much), It's safe to say that there was no real onboarding of new players who really converted into long-term paying players. So this one feels like the HBD they got to do some onboarding mainly translated in giving a salary to a new Marketing employee. I do really like the Grand Prix initiative from @bulldog1205 wich likely was way more effective as a marketing initiative compared to anything else.

Prediction #4: Few Players Will Really care About Land.

I personally don't like or don't care about land so I'm not fully up to date. From what I understand there was development in the land game where it's now possible to craft different kind of potions and scrolls using the resources and I have seen a couple people at least who are somewhat enthusiastic about it. At the same time, I also hear reports that it's impossible to run land profitably. This thing also is that I don't see land as something that will bring in a single new player and it's mostly to give those with older assets something to do so they can get new stuff that is created.

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Prediction #5: Conclave Arcana Will Do Equally Low Sales as Rebellion

Multiple 3rd party sites about Splinterlands went down in 2025 icluding splintercards.com (This website is no longer being updated. Content and tools may not always be reliable or work properly) where i used to track these numbers. Conclave Arcana was a success at the start bringing in enough money for the team to keep going but ever since things really slowed down and I don't think it will even reach the Rebellion numbers time is running out.

Prediction #6: Blogging about Splinterlands By Far Remains the Best Earning Potential

This has been the case for years and despite the price of Hive falling a lot, it still remains the case that most of the value that can be earned in the Splinterlands ecosystem comes from making content around the game. I have slowed down my production a lot as I'm simply less passionate about the game anymore and don't want to be hammering time after time on all the obvious things that should be done to improve the game. That said, I still very much enjoy writing about the game so whenever I have something to share like this post I will continue to do so.

Prediction #7: SPS will reach at least 0.03$-0.04$

This one I was simply dead wrong about at the highly anticipated alt season never came and SPS continued to slowly bleed down as more coins were released as a reward token while no new players came in.

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2026 Predictions

The ongoing pattern in Splinterlands by now is quite clear and my only real prediction for 2026 is for this to continue. The game continues to survive mainly to the extent where it brings enough money to keep up paying the salaries of the Devs who mainly just add more and more stuff which doesn't fix the fundamental issues why no new players are coming in. Splinterlands really needs to put priority on

• Reducing Ridiculaos Time Requirements
• Going Away From the Extreme Pay2Win
• Make Unaffordable Costs Optional
• Stop Devaluating Existing Assests
• Remove Extreme Complexity
• Reduce Power Creep
• Make things more Investor Friendly

The way to do all this is to create a new game mode that is Pay2Play (see How This Could Fix Everything)

Without something like this, the only real hope is for crypto to get into a 'gaming' Altcoin Season where everything pumps again which would temprary peak the interest. However, given how 2025 went, this is just very unlikely.

Prediction: Splinterlands Survives, but stays stuck in the same broken ways and fails to really attract any new players.

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Conclusion

I deliberately have low expectations for 2026 after all these years, also because my hope and enthusiasm around Splinterlands has been broken down after years where the core issues of the game continue to be neglected.

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