I mean it all comes down to greed and devs needing to stop employing pay-to-win mechanics. Those potions on splinterlands are a fucking joke and obviously shouldn't exist.
They are either not worth using, in which case they shouldn't exist, or they are worth using, in which case they shouldn't exist because they should just be automatically incorporated without having to do an extra thing.
Blockchain gaming will always be a joke until the games themselves are owned, operated, and maintained by the players/community themselves. As far as I'm concerned if the project has a centralized dev team it's invalid across the board.
If it's built on a blockchain, Hive for example, when I first heard about building games here for some reason I thought the decentralized nature of Hive is what gave it all those qualities and envisioned games simply using the tokens we have, HIVE and HBD in this case.
You'd subscribe to the game giving you access in your Hive browser, at a cost and that money goes to the devs, no different than buying a game. From there this game has a list of subscribers, all with HP, and there's your little subcommunity, with access to reward pool. With each game creating a new reason for a consumer to want or need to buy tokens, I though HIVE would be shooting to the moon.
Instead, every game built within the community provides a reason to dump your hive, weakening decentralization across the board. Each game is like its own government, and buying in taxes Hive in a sense, and Hive isn't benefiting from these taxes.
Remember arcades? Did you need a token or did you need, a pinball token to play pinball, a street fighter token to play street fighter, a mortal kombat token to play mortal combat, a holy fuck token to play holy fuck.
If that were the case, the busiest line would be at the exchange counter, not the games. Then when people realize they go to the arcade to stand in line at the exchange instead of playing games, they lose interest. Meanwhile the hardcore "gamers" at this arcade think more gamers will come if you pay out Kano tokens if you win with Kano, Raiden tokens if you win with Raiden, Subzero tokens... so now you got an even bigger line at the goddamn exchange counter. And they think it's a good idea because they put the most mortal kombat tokens into mortal kombat so what they say, matters.
I didn't walk up to that claw machine, put a token in, and get a prize. If that was the case, nobody would play that fucking thing, they'd just go buy the prize. That's what "play to earn" is. Fuck the game. Buy the prize.