This'll be a bit of a different post from my usual Zing related ones lately (sorry to those who've followed me for news about the game), but I think it's important these things are public.
The Zing ecosystem, believe it or not, is already quite unique even though not much has been done/released yet to the public aside from an announcement post with a whitepaper and a token distribution launch. I'll get to why here in a second.
I've loved healing in games for a long time, whether it was in PvE being that chill role where you can lay back while following strategies to avoid dying and looking at your team mates health bars to keep up, or the epic moments in PvP where DPS are going ham at each other and you get in range all of a sudden to cast large heals on your mates to turn the tide. I felt that some of these games never really focused much on PvP and especially the balancing part (yes I'm mostly thinking about World of Warcraft here). The main thing for them was always PvE and the mainstream, which is normal because that's what drives in most of the money.
Over the years as I got older and more interested in finance and how the world works, it seemed quite obvious that most of the focus of these giant gaming companies was of course; money. After reading more and more about their history, the lengths they'd go to avoid paying taxes, to bring in the most amount of money to CEO's and shareholders, etc, it wasn't difficult to assume that their focus is and was always going to be that. The sad reality is that most games work like this these days, especially the popular ones. Games have also lost part of their charm over the years with companies from the gates aiming at what will bring in the most money while utilizing psychological tricks and manipulation on players to keep them playing and spending more and more money and time on their games and at the end having nothing to show for aside from ingame achievements and accomplishments. Which, you know, once your ingame friends stop playing or they decide not to run the servers any longer due to certain reasons, it's hard to continue enjoying the game any longer.
There are a few gems that certain studios have released over the years and many of them have received the appreciation they deserve, thinking games like Hades, Vampire Survivors, Elden Ring and games like The legend of Zelda for the Nintendo Switch, but it feels like it's mostly single player games that remain the values I used to see in games without trying to rob players out of their time and money. Meaning that when it comes to online games like WoW, Hearthstone FIFA and others, it's all about how we can make the most amount of money from the playerbase while the only thing they get in return is fun/entertainment and a little grain of sunk cost fallacy. It's a little similar to social media platforms and why users are reluctant to switch their focus over to others or try new things I believe.
Now I'm not saying that games have to be more than fun and entertaining, the whole play to earn aspect is quite new and still very misunderstood and ineffective in most of the games that popped for a while mostly cause of the rest of the crypto market, but the question remains as to why not both. The bigger question is of course ownership and why this is something web2 people continuously ignore while hating the guts out of the words nft and blockchain. I think sunk cost fallacy plays a big role here too and I also wanna discuss why I think cross-game assets can help this.
I'm going to also warn you that I'm going to be making a lot of references to social media accounts in this post because with web2 vs web3 a lot of the same issues go for both socials and games. While this isn't such a huge problem in the gaming world, my example above proves my point quite heavily. For instance, we've seen Youtube accounts get demonetized and deleted/blocked or blacklisted from Algo's/shadowbanned, some of the few times we heard about it was because some big accounts had been the ones on that receiving end and they have an easy time making noise about it due to their large presence on several social media platforms. I've also mentioned in posts before that while that's nice that they got the unfair punishment revoked because Youtube didn't like the backlash and negative news being spread, what about all the small-time YouTubers this must continue be happening to daily? They don't have the same voice and I bet that in only very rare cases do their voives get amplified to push YouTube to look at their case more closely compared to just facing an AI/automated message system telling them they have to wait/nothing can be done about it. For games, it has mostly been cheaters who have been affected by the ban hammer, and that's not something I disagree with, cheaters are the worst and if it was on me I'd introduce some laws similar to how South Korea has them where people cheating in games can face large fines. But, there's also cheating in the reporting systems, we've seen this happen often on Youtube and other socials where bots/clickfarms go on a rampage reporting certain accounts and they get them automatically banned. While web2 socials are a bit more common for people to earn on so they know how it feels to lose their source of income from false reporting after having invested a ton of their time on it to the point where they got lucky enough to be that small % that make enough money where they rely on it, in web2 games it isn't. This means that when you get your gaming account banned you lose all the assets, achievements and on top of it access to potentially your favorite thing in the same go, which isn't a great feeling if you did nothing wrong. Sure many would say that's fair when it comes to cheaters but I think it's more important to not let those cheaters acquire assets by cheating than to take everything away because they made a mistake once/were falsely accused/something weird happened to their account (others cheating on their account, malicious activity on their pc, etc)
Another recent article on games being shut down. Gaming assets the players never controlled being lost forever.
You know what's also weird when it comes to transparency? The only reason we have some transparency is because the laws force people to make it public within companies how much employees earn, most likely due to tax reasons. It seems in the "web3" space this has become a lot less common because the technology makes privacy in that regard possible, especially if projects aren't public companies. This is something I'd want to make transparent with holozing even if we never become a real company (more thoughts about that in a future post). Blockchain systems, especially Hive, make it easy for things to be transparent and for people to check what's being done with funds. For a project that's fairly launched and community funded I reckon transparency is even more so important. That's why we're going to be launching transparency reports here soon detailing costs and where holozing funds are going. For what its worth, I haven't paid myself anything with the funds POSH has kickstarted for Holozing so far, this has been like a hobby to me but eventually it's something I'd wanna change but here again I think it's important to not delve into the ways of web2 but keep things fair.
Meaning that those working on the project and necessary will receive the same "rewards" for their time and effort compared to tier-lists the way web2 projects do it. I don't believe CEO's should be receiving 10-1000x the pay compared to regular devs in a project just because the project is that big. I honestly find it quite disgusting seeing some of the top CEO's and what they earn as if they're that special compared to others and in the same go I also find it disgusting that people doing the same/similar work get paid less based on where they're located. That's something I don't want to make the same mistakes on with my projects.
So why is holozing different? There's many reasons, but one important one I think is quite obvious when you see the way distribution started and how it's going. There are a couple accounts there currently delegating more to the project than my account is, even though I have other accounts I'm delegating with so technically own more zing than some others (as far as I know unless there's some secret accounts that belong to others on the list too), it still makes it possible for others to overtake me. Main point is I have to earn skin in the game and token the same way others are, through delegations, whereby in other places they would've expected to give themselves at least 30% if not more. The weird thing is that I'm okay with others earning more tokens than I do, because that means there's more money for the team and development, even if I'm not getting any of that right now. Cause the way the game is built is that it supports the underlying framework which is Hive, if the game does well and brings in more people then Hive does well too because it needs more users. Which means that the tokens I've earned by then become more valuable along with the tokens that let me earn it so it's pretty much a win-win situation for everyone here involved.
While we still for now control everything with the game's development, it doesn't mean that it will always have to be that way. As funding and the team grow there might be people who join who are better at what I'm trying to do with it which is the idea behind it and trying to organize and manage the project. At the same time if something were to go wrong where I or the team couldn't continue operating for some reason, we'd want the code to eventually become open so that others could continue to build on top and receive value from the zing account for doing so. Giving the assets on Zing longevity and multi-purposes.
Lastly, what does it mean if the game continues to get a lot of funding, hive starts doing well meaning the same funding appreciates in value all while there's no CEO/CTO/etc getting millions per year for having helped create a million player game (if everything goes well)? Well, that means there's going to be a lot of excess funding for some fun stuff within the ecosystem. That's what I'm mostly looking forward to myself, being able to expand the ecosystem into many games, platforms, and mediums. Something many giants today have managed to do and done well but this time that value goes out to everyone and the players rather than the whole pie going to shareholders, ceo's/founders, and employees. All while the games are unstoppable using decentralization and can't just go down or get banned.
I'll be posting an update on website stats along with one of the first transparency reports of costs, some debt (unfortunately) and earnings of the holozing ecosystem thus far tomorrow from the @holozing account, so stay tuned for that. I hope many gamers who may read this may have understood the value of nfts and decentralization and true web3 with this post compared to the stigmas and fake web3s we hear all about in the rest of the web. Thanks for reading.
Images created with Midjourney for this post alone and don't necessarily reflect on the game.