A lot of people, especially Bitcoiners, like to praise bitcoin's launch as truly fair.
This post isn't about Bitcoin, but I wanted to bring that part up as it is kind of related to the post yesterday about Zing, hopefully you aren't too tired yet of me posting about it.
Satoshi had emailed some people about the launch and some joined in using their computers, mainly CPU's to mine it. 50 Bitcoin every 10 minutes would go out randomly to people based on how many CPU's they had working on it.
I think the reason they call this truly fair is because so few thought it would go anywhere, so there weren't people renting servers to mine it (maybe some who easily got obsessed with seeing number go up) like they would these days and like we saw when coins like Ethereum launched or even Steem Hive. It also had a very long time of being "worthless", cue 2 bitcoin pizzas for 10k btc, etc.
One could argue Hive is close to those levels as well, allowing for a very cheap entry price to anyone interested in governing or curating or building a presence here and believes it has a future. I don't think I need to write much about what the effects of having a stake on hive means for how well you do in terms of attention and rewards, one easy look at @hurtlocker would tell you that it's a good way to gain attention and a following because people value you more if you have stake.
One could argue that Zing is kind of tied to Hive due to rewards for delegations and its price, so even though it doesn't have the governance aspect of Hive it may offer a good entry point for long term investors if they believe in it, similar to Hive. Needless to say though, not too many do currently or else the price wouldn't be this low (not counting overinflation and its effects on price we may have caused in the past couple years due to the DHF, HBD APR, etc)
Okay, so why am I bringing this up?
This blogpost caught my attention today, basically Unity itself is launching an AI tech stack to make creating games even easier for people than it has been before, and I'm sure this is only the beginning.
This means that costs are going to go way down for creating games and maintaining them, the barrier to entry so to speak won't always require that prior investment and full team of devs to make your ideas become reality.
What does this mean for Zing?
Well, it's not bad news. Yes, we have spent quite a bit on unity gamedev so far but our plans/goals were never to stop at one game.
This means that this will allow us to continue to generate games of all kinds we believe people will like and connect them to the Zing universe as well as the social aspect to the Hive blockchain.
Eventually you will see indie studios pop up left and right, but as most web2 and web3 projects currently, I don't see many of them giving up the rights to equity/ownership the way we've gone about it. Where anyone/everyone can participate in the success of the token and it was fairly launched.
This is quite important and I'm glad I decided to go this route.
For most other projects you have to buy shares or token with unknown distribution, you have to endure founders/creators having most of the equity and using it to evade taxes or take out loans against it or sell over time, etc, while you spend thousands of $ to own a tiny portion of it and hope the markets swing your way.
Why is Zing different exactly?
Well, Zing will utilize its token to be used in all its games. You may think of it like a burn mechanic in most games and diverse other functions. If you want your healers leveled up all the way in the professions, there's a cost attached to it in terms of Zing burn. If you want to capture creatures, every captured creature has a base zing cost attached to it because cards, capture ammo, mana, etc, all require some zing to be burned along the way. If and when we have launched more games, there may be games competing against each other in who's burning more zing vs who's earning more zing.
We as the team/studio are also not interested in hoarding any and all revenues we may receive over time from the games. Other than having safety nets for tougher times, maintenance costs and money set aside for further development (which with AI may become cheaper and cheaper), we may use the rest of funds we don't need to simply burn Zing from the supply. A sort of buyback program where it's fiat vs zing, or any crypto vs zing really.
Think about merch, any profits generated could technically burn zing. Think of ads/sponsorships/etc, any additional profits generated could be used to simply burn Zing.
If the team doesn't need the extra money, it'll go towards burning Zing. We don't wanna pay more taxes than necessary, so why not simply spend those profits to make the token that powers all our games/franchise stronger and more scarce?
Point being, other "companies" with their teams and CEO's are most of the time going to look at getting their bonuses or making sure their shareholders are happy by giving them as much profit as possible. CEO salaries have shot through the roof in recent years and companies are in many cases literally killing games in exchange of pure greed. While players and fans never see a dime of it and are mainly seen as cashcows. This is something we aim to change, even though it may be a naive thing to say at this point in time, I don't think there's going to be many others who can compete with that philosophy because they're not going to want to.
Ask yourself this, where would facebook shares be priced at today if Mark Zuckerberg got a regular salary and all the billions of $ his shares are worth would've instead bought up those shares and burnt them?
I don't have an answer to it, but it excites me to see what could be done if we do things differently. Naturally, we'd also be very grateful to Hive and if our presence and accomplishments themselves aren't beneficial enough for the ecosystem, we'd make sure we burn some of it along the way too.
Now don't get me wrong, we're still in the very very early stages and struggling, and I'm not saying if things go extremely well it means that I personally wouldn't make any money off of it or keep it modest, since I do have a large stake in Zing, but I've bought and earned that stake at the cost of something else, Hive/HBD/other crypto. It's not just been given to me cause I've spent a lot of time working on it and had a cool idea and made it work. There's others with similar sized stake as myself currently and they've also had to forfeit hive rewards to get it. Similarly there's also smaller staked users and in the future anyone/everyone who plays the game or buys some merch or participates in some ways can become a shareholder in the project, which is very different from the current franchises we know who are giants in the space and have been growing with fans and players being one of the main products rather than partners.