Some things I haven't been posting about or mentioning in public have been weighing me down a bit lately, these are the things most people probably ignore or don't think about, but I wanted to vent a little bit here today and at the same time mention that it feels a bit better getting rid of some debt even at these bad times price-wise.
I guess things started off on a positive note and what many of us expected didn't come to fruition. When we launched holozing, hive was doing rather well, at the same time bitcoin and eth were starting to reach new all time highs, etc, and surely hive would follow, but little did we know it wouldn't. Not only wouldn't it follow but it decided to stay where it was for the longest time and then start dipping lower.
I didn't wanna be the guy who lowers the fees of contributions because that's a slippery slope either to degraded performance/moral or to people losing interest, so for the longest time I've been trying to carry the difference with my own finances and then eventually ask some help from the DHF.
Let me tell you, it's not been fun. :D especially as someone who's a "hive maxi" and has all of his eggs in one basket and barely has spent any time even looking at other ecosystems/projects in the last 4-5 years.
I'm stubborn usually, I don't like to let projects die and I try to be flexible with them so they can still bring some value over time to participants or the ecosystem. That's not saying zing is close to dying, but I've went way above and beyond to make sure it survives. But that's had a cost.
Honestly, I don't even really know where to begin with this post, there's so many factors involved that I'm not really sure where to begin nor everything I ought to mention.
Point is, hiring people from the outside they do rely on usd and don't really care if your main currency is doing badly or if the investment is shrinking. Not to mention my own earnings barely being able to cover anything over time as so much of my value kept getting locked up in my project.
I was aware that this is going to be a longterm play, I just didn't expect it to eat up so much of my other longterm play; hive.
Crazy to think that early on I thought maybe I could even earn some hive from the project for my contributions, think the amount I've "paid myself" has been a total of 6k hive when I thought we were doing good and things would turn around soon.
As I mentioned in a previous post, however, things aren't as doom and gloom anymore, but the tail to paying off debt we've accrued over time has gotten very long at current evaluations. For instance holozing only earns roughly 2k hive per week at the moment which is roughly $80, so maybe you can imagine the situation a bit better that way. Purchases of alpha vials have dried up as well which is understandable, like I'm not trying to blame anyone in this situation. I've built and planned out distribution and things myself and tried to keep them as fair as possible, rather than prioratizing my own investment and the game's launch and success. Maybe I've been too biased because Hive is my real "marriage" if you will and zing was just our baby, differently compared to house of the dragon episode 1, I wouldn't risk my marriage if the pregnancy was causing complications.
Today I can announce that there's only $250 left to pay artists from the holozing debt as some of the last artworks came in that we needed for part of the game. Other than that, rest of payments are a bit less "GIVE MONEY NOW OR ELSE". But there are still some outstanding debts, $2k to gamedev who hasn't worked much on anything since we started using Claude, cause we couldn't afford him anymore + we figured maybe we can do it ourselves from now on (and to a large degree I believe we can) and lastly $4k outstanding debt for HAF NFTs (half of the cost) we had someone else pay off as we focused on paying for development of the game.
How long is it going to take for the project to amess $6,250 with $80/week in earnings? :D roughly 1.5 years + maybe some interest will be due as well.
I reckon a lot of projects/ideas/other are kind of in limbo at the moment awaiting hive to do a bit better, but that's kind of also a reason I think we ought to use the DHF during these times because development/adoption out there isn't stopping, if we stop completely then we're just going to become more and more forgotten, I fear.
This isn't me trying to sneak in a new proposal for our game, I'm not sure when the best time would be to push that out but I doubt it is now. Web3 gaming doesn't have a great reputation currently with so many multimillion $ "companies" gtting shut down these last couplen years in that sector. While we've tried to stand out both as a web3 and web2 game, I don't think we're too much in a rush to the gate. Better to take it slow and make sure what we release is polished and works well.
Currently a big hurdle has been our animator being located somewhere where things are not going so good for the country yet little of it is mentioned in the news because the country doing it to them basically controls the news. I wish for a better outcome soon there, not just for the sake of our game but for the suffering of the people the current situation is causing. For the game however, we're not really in a position currently to look for alternatives so it's kind of a waiting game there but we hope it won't hold us back in terms of testing and it shouldn't.
is there a game yet? how do i play? ive been hanging in the staking area for like 5 years, its just a scam and no game?
It's kind of rough to read comments like these from time to time. While I do understand these are uninformed people who probably haven't looked into the project or hive for that matters in a long time, nor do they probably understand my own position, it still is a bit triggering.
Either way, dunno what there is to say or do at this point in time, I'm kind of at my limits in terms of how much more value I can spend on this project, but I'm not giving up. I'll continue to experiment with some games and start launching some more games into testable alpha/beta here soon, people can either play them or not, they won't be for everyone. Eventually I'll get back to the main game when I see there's an ending to the missing animations and 3d.
It just feels a bit nicer now to almost be out of the woods in terms of "outsider debt" and that we aren't taking on any more things that cost for a while, hopefully things turn around for hive to help us get out of debt from our more patient supporters and that we can start looking forward with having things to play and do in the ecosystem rather than just waiting around and hoping things fall into place if we just throw money at it.
