Due to the exponential nature of the rewards, only a handful of people have had any effect on SteemSports posts, and those people, have had no economic incentives to vote, as they would not receive any financial reward other than the curation reward, which is a standard feature for any steem post.
You are right about the incentives, which would in fact encourage people to support SteemSports, and thus make games and the SP redistribution possible. The premise behind the games is that user engagement and token distributions are a net positive. Since the whale support in this case is altruistic in nature, can it really be labeled as collusive in negative sense?
I thought it was great at first, but they just kept pumping out the posts as fast as the voting bots could upvote them.
I get what you're trying to say, but let me point out that altruism can be seen as an outright destructive behaviour and collusion as a method of survival.
It all depends on context and having coherent definitions of said words.