2018 will certainly witness some attrition amongst the altcoins not least as projects that thought they were well funded did not take adequate measures for a huge downturn in the Etherreum price and now find themselves running on fumes. The stronger well managed projects will however survive and will prove to be great investment opportunities for 2019 and beyond.
I wish there were some competition but for the moment most tokens and coins are strongly linked to Bitcoin and perhaps ethereum. The market is not yet mature to offer real competition.
Although if you analyze more detailed most of them are competing to take the 2nd position from overall highest coin with total market cap. you see eos eth cardano they are competing each other and I can say it's competition, also some token under those smart contract platform are also competing each other, it's not always competing to get 1st position.