I'm Quitting Gods Unchained Again
I'm quitting Gods Unchained again. I really hoped I'd never have to make this video. I said I'd play Gods Unchained until the game died or until I died, and, well, maybe a little bit of both happened. I'm going to tell you why I quit Gods Unchained after playing it and streaming it for months, getting really into it, building a huge collection of cards, selling all of them, quitting, taking a couple of months off, and then coming back in hard and fast, streaming every day and buying $5,000 more in cards. This is what happened. If you're thinking about playing Gods Unchained, if you're already playing, or if you quit, I hope this is helpful for you.
If you're new, Gods Unchained is a Web3 customizable card game. It's a game where you can actually own the cards in the form of NFTs. The quality of the game and the amount of players make it a lot of fun. That said, it wasn't a lot of fun at first. When I first played, I thought, yeah, that's okay. But I only played this originally because they sponsored me to play it and stream it on Twitch, and I'm grateful, because we had the best community I've ever had on Twitch.
The main reason I was drawn to play Gods Unchained is that when I actually played it for the first time in my life, I had viewers. If I streamed almost anything else, nobody watched. I streamed Hades the other day and got like six average viewers. But I streamed Gods Unchained and I'd get lots of people. So the best part to me about playing Gods Unchained as a streamer, or a former streamer, was that people actually watched, and I really liked that aspect. If you've enjoyed being part of that world with me, the best place to keep building it together now is to join the Jerry Banfield Family community, where we can talk games, crypto, and everything in between.
The Choice Between Streaming and Making Videos
Here's the main thing I didn't like. For me, I am a husband. I have two kids, which makes me a father. And this is what I do, this is my career, filming videos and streaming. After 76 hours streaming Gods Unchained, I realized I don't have time to both stream and make videos. I tried just streaming Gods Unchained single-handedly without hardly making any YouTube videos, but that amount of income isn't going to cut it. So I tried doing some videos on my YouTube channels while streaming, but then that amount of time isn't going to cut it either.
Those 76 hours are enough time for me to make close to a hundred YouTube videos, because I can make at least two videos an hour. A hundred YouTube videos is a video every other day on five channels, and I have six different channels, so I could put videos up several times a week on six different channels. That easily makes me tens of thousands of dollars a month, and people watch much more on YouTube than they do on my streams. So one big reason I've quit Gods Unchained is that I have to make a choice: either I put videos on these six YouTube channels, or I play Gods Unchained. I just can't do both.
Why I Can't Just Play Casually
The next thing you're likely to ask is, well, why don't you just play Gods Unchained casually instead? You don't have to stream 76 hours in a month, which is about two and a half hours a day. Why not just play a couple of hours on the weekend? People would still watch. The problem is that Gods Unchained is not fun without a big collection of cards.
If I show you my Gods Unchained scans, I've just traded over $20,000 in volume on cards, and I lost a thousand dollars just in buy and sell volume. But really I lost almost two thousand when you consider the card packs I bought, and I actually lost more than four or five thousand playing Gods Unchained, because I also gave away ten GODS every time I won. That was a big reason people were watching my stream. And what really sucks about Gods Unchained is that if you don't have the good cards to make some of the best decks, then the game is really not fun.
This, to me, is not a game you want to play casually. If you want to see the decks that are really fun to play with, look: this deck costs two thousand four hundred dollars, and it works much better than most decks. Here's one of the cheaper decks that actually wins more often. This one is only three hundred dollars, and it wins much more often on average. Now, I know there are budget decks. But if you really want to slay the budget decks, you often need several decks that cost several thousand dollars. This isn't completely a pay-to-win game, but it is mostly a pay-to-win game. You take an $1,800 deck like this and you can really slay, and it's not fun.
If you look at the player stats in the weekend ranked, most of the time whoever won was using decks that are expensive. Let me look at some of the decks this person's playing. They were number one on the weekend ranked, running a $2,500 deck and a $2,116 deck. If you want to be at the top in Gods Unchained, you really need to grind, play all the time, and have a big card collection.
That brings me back to the question: why don't you just play casually? Because I don't want to sit on a several-thousand-dollar card collection just to play casually. Do you know how many PlayStation and Xbox games I could buy? Just with the $1,000 I lost between the buy and sell volume, not to mention all the gas fees I paid to put the money on through IMX, and all the fees I paid buying and then selling this crypto.
Will Gods Unchained Do Well Long Term?
I also question whether Gods Unchained will do well in the long term. Right now, Gods Unchained is a play-to-earn game. The first time I quit, I woke up in the middle of the night at 4 a.m. after having put $10,000 into Gods Unchained between the cards and my GODS for the giveaways. At that time, when I bought the cards and the GODS to give them away, the price was around 30 cents. I managed to lose about $1,000 just holding on to GODS as it went down to 20 cents. And now it's down to 17 cents. In my experience, I think we go straight down, maybe a pump here or there, but there's no reason for an investor to buy and hold GODS.
On my Jerry Banfield crypto channel, I was just making a whole bunch of videos to do anything to get views, basically like most crypto YouTubers are doing, constantly going out there and talking about how great all these altcoins are. And the sad thing is, it was working. I grew a channel from zero to 13,000 subs, making more than $10,000 in just a few months from zero. But I've had a change of heart there too. As I looked at the data, I've learned. I've been in crypto nine years. In my experience, most cryptos suck. Most cryptos lose in the long term. The average return of the top 2,000 cryptos five years ago to today is minus 56%. That includes all the 100Xs and the 1,000Xs, and it does not even include those that went completely to zero.
So I've been maturing in what kind of crypto videos I'm delivering. And the more I've matured in my crypto videos and investing, the clearer it is to me that Gods Unchained is totally unsustainable. The play-to-earn may have a little pump at some point, but the more people play the game and the more the price goes up, the more inevitable sell pressure there is as the tokens are handed out. In my view, there's no way this works out in the long term. The game has pretty much just lost players ever since it came out. It hit a peak of like 50,000 players a day, and then it's been going down like the price. The lower the price goes, the less lucrative the play-to-earn is.
While I love the game, and the game itself is fun, I don't want to play a customizable card game if I'm not playing all the time and not streaming. I don't want to play a competitive card game where you need thousands of dollars of cards just to have a better-than-average chance of winning. I'd prefer to just play something like Hades or Hogwarts Legacy, but the viewers don't want to watch that. So I'd rather not even live stream. If I'm going to play games, this is not the kind of game I want to play for fun off stream.
The Card Sets Dump on Old Cards
Let's look at another thing here on Gods Unchained. The team said they don't pay attention to the market prices of the cards, and this is a problem. If you're one of the people like me who bought thousands and thousands of dollars of cards, the Gods Unchained team is inevitably driven toward making a profit by selling card packs. That's where they get to keep all the money, when they sell the card packs. Therefore, they're always going to want to release cards that dump on the old cards. This is no surprise. Look at Magic: The Gathering and how they rotate sets out. Customizable card games universally want to sell cards.
So with Gods Unchained, look at what's happened with Demogorgon over the last three months. They released a new card set. Demogorgon, for quite a while, was consistently hovering around four or five hundred dollars no matter what the ETH price was. But then they released this new card set where they put something very cheap in it. Instead of Demogorgon, you can now use a card called Ember Oni. They put in this seven-drop that has Leech and Burn 2, deals two damage when it comes out, and gives Burn 2. In some situations it's actually better than Demogorgon, because if your opponent has a really wide board, you can heal as much as 12 off hitting your opponent's creatures. Then you can even heal off your own creatures. Whereas Demogorgon is going to heal a maximum of three the turn it comes out, and a maximum on the next turn it could go off pretty well. But with this one, it works just as well as Demogorgon, and in a lot of situations you can even knock things like Protected off. This card really slays and is effective, and the cards are $1.68.
Why the cards keep tanking
This is exactly why things like Demogorgon have just tanked in price since these cards came out. I'm lucky I sold mine for $400 and something, because it went straight down into the $300s. With Gods Unchained, you really can't win on this front — you're inevitably going to get destroyed. With the Gods token, you can't hold on to cards over the long term, because the developers have too much incentive to just put out a card that does the same thing and kills the value of the older cards. And at the same time, in the short term, you do need the cards to have the best decks. So to me, this is a very expensive game. If you really want to play and enjoy it, it costs a lot of money — way more than you'd expect. I put in enough to buy a PlayStation, an Xbox Series X, Game Pass, and PlayStation Plus. For everything I've put in, I could have afforded to buy another gaming PC as well. This game is way too expensive, and it's not good from an investment point of view.
What pushed me to finally say it
I was motivated to make this after Timothy Meadows, who goes by Bird Engineer in the Gods Unchained community, said that he's quitting Gods Unchained as well. And I realized — wow, I've been avoiding making this for a while, because I didn't want to make it. I didn't want to talk about it. At the same time, it's important to be flexible in life. I said I'd never quit Gods Unchained again until the game died or until I died. Well, it looks like the game is dying, in my view. The game is not growing — that's a fact. If you look at the player numbers, they just keep going down. In fact, there are a lot of people who appear to be using multiple accounts, so the player numbers are probably inflated a bit.
In his post, Timothy talked about how he's started playing a lot fewer games a day. And here's the key thing: he can no longer ignore his growing disenchantment with the game developers. Over time, he's become increasingly doubtful about their decisions regarding the game's direction and their actual ability to create a sustainable product. I feel the exact same way. I don't see that this is going in a good direction. To me, Gods Unchained, unfortunately, is either an all-in or an all-out game.
The promise of true ownership
One of the things I really liked about Gods Unchained is the promise of a game that pays to play, with true ownership by the players. The site says "true ownership for players." But in my experience this isn't really true ownership, in the sense that when I buy a card, they can change that card — and they've made some big changes to the cards. For example, they buffed up a card called Firewall and the price went through the roof. They nerfed a card called Magic Missile Launcher that was worth hundreds of dollars, and it tanked $150 almost overnight. The game is very, very centralized. There's a small group of people who make all the decisions for the game.
Then you've got things like the Internet Computer Protocol, where you could make a game like this that's fully on chain — one that the players actually control, where the players decide the rules and can make different versions of it. Gods Unchained is basically a Web 2.5 game. It has some true ownership, but it's still extremely centralized. It's not really a game run by the players. What's cool to see is that there are some games coming out — and there are going to be a lot more of these — where the game is created in a way that the players actually do control it, where things can be voted on and controlled directly by a DAO, and where everything that happens is on chain. Right now in Gods Unchained, very little actually happens on chain, because most of it happens through the game client, which is not on chain, and a bunch of the cards — all the ones that are of playing quality — are not on chain either. I'd like to see a game that's completely designed on chain, where you do have more true ownership for the players. That may be difficult to deliver, but somebody's going to do it.
Knowing when to walk away
And while I've loved Gods Unchained, in the past 30 days I played 195 games of it. I find that without all the nice cards, and without people watching, I don't really want to play Gods Unchained. I have 67 wins in the past 30 days, and the last game I played was off stream with a $200 Hidden Rush deck. I just don't have the desire to play Gods Unchained off stream. To me, that says I shouldn't play the game at all. Compare that to something like Hogwarts Legacy — I'll play that thing off stream all day.
I really appreciate you being here, and I'd love to stay connected with you. If this kind of honest look at games is your thing, the best way to keep the conversation going with me is to join the Jerry Banfield Family, where we talk through all of it together. I love the Gods Unchained community, but this game is not here to stay — the game is dying. If you want to see more of where my gaming energy is going next, you can dive into my Games playlist.
I love you each, and I'll keep creating more videos for you.