Recently, the team responsible for developing Splinterlands did a recap on how Holiday Skins were added to the web3 collectible card game, which now also features collectible skins. This is a topic I've been addressing in some content, even before the first Holiday Skin was implemented. The difference is that I only focused on the implementation of the skins, while the Splinterlands team sought to link them to events, which was a great success, with a burn of over 50 million glint.
That's right, you didn't misread the number: over 50 MILLION GLINT were spent on cosmetic items, the Holiday Skins, in just 2025, and that's in only 3 collections (Hallow's Fall, Dragon's Feast, Winterfest). This is an incredible topic that deserves further exploration because it directly impacts the economy of the NFT game, as it creates even more demand for one of the game's tokens, Glint. And it's worth mentioning that Glint is becoming a key component of Splinterlands, already used in various game content, and its usefulness is only increasing.
Therefore, considering this topic, let's start by discussing why Skins are a great solution for the Splinterlands economy, understanding in more depth how skin spending was done in 2025, why players like skins, and what could make them even better. Come check it all out!
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[ENGLISH VERSION]
Holiday Skins 2025 x Glint Spend
More specifically, the total guild spend that the first Holiday Skins managed to generate in Gwen's Glint Shop was 57 million Glint, which was permanently burned by the skins throughout the 3 events that received such skins last year: Hallow's Fall, Dragon's Feast, and Winterfest.
The event that saw the highest GLINT expenditure on skins was precisely the first one, Hallow's Fall. Perhaps because it was the first, and users were surprised to have the option to spend their glint on the first skins after a long time without them being available, mixed with some uncertainty about whether it would be a one-off collection and never again, the spending was significant.
More than half, a total of 36,565,205 glint, was used in this event, mainly to secure the Yaba's Pickle and Meriput Magician skins, with 1241 and 867 respectively. These were the most minted skins, but not the ones that consumed the most glint. This shows that players with little glint like card skins that have some representation or that they use a lot in battles, while players with a lot of glint like exclusivity and are willing to pay the premium price for them.
Soon after, Dragon's Feast ended up burning less glint, I believe due to the lack of cards that the community would like to have skins for. The highlight was the Gobalano Soldier with 948 minted skins, a very useful card in Sneak strategies of the fire element.
Finally, a new increase in the amount of glint spent occurred during Winterfest, with more than double that of Dragon's Feast, burning 13,822,665 glint in what is one of the most iconic events of the year, Christmas. The most minted card was Surgeblade with 879 mints, but the ones that burned the most glint were the Azhar Ibn Sulaim and Sten Slathelm skins, each with 4.3M glint.
Why are Skins a great solution?
It's common knowledge among most players that cosmetics are one of the main sources of income for games, but to achieve this, they need to create demand, an audience that wants these collectible items. We realized, with the 57 million glint spent on Holiday Skins in 2025, that there is this demand, and there is a sustainable future that the Splinterlands developers can explore with more cosmetics, such as card skins, customizable land skins, player profile accessories, and much more.
The success of Holiday Skins came from the great idea of linking these skins to events, which also helps with the game's marketing during these festive dates, since designers work on campaigns and already need themed artwork, and thus they can use the artwork to create a skin for the game. But without creating scarcity, it might not work, so they made these skins limited to the event period, and after its end, they could only be acquired from other players through the game's marketplace using DEC.
In this way, they manage to generate a new desirable item for players, make the game more fun with the addition of skins in matches, improve the game's economy since players will need glint to buy skins and to have more glint they will need better cards and more SPS in Stake, and they also create a new secondary item market with the skins.
However, it's important to study what worked well in the Hallow's Fall event, which was by far the biggest of the three, and what went wrong in the Dragon's Feast, which had a much lower number of participants than the others. It might be better to focus only on global events and not regional ones, since the demand would be higher, for example. Or, another suggestion would be to create skins with small buffs, such as +1 stats, increasing the price in glint for this type of skin, and giving them greater exclusivity, which would attract more players.
