The title may be a bit funny to one person, a.k.a. @holovision who's been on hive in forever and made it clear he's not part of the project when we announced @holozing, just a coincidence :D
Anyway, found some time to post after a week. I have to admit I've felt a bit burnout-ish this past week as well which caused for some slower days. With things moving faster ahead now there some times comes a feeling of getting overwhelmed, I'm not sure if this is something I can handle for too long but there's vacation days coming up and some of our devs are going to take a short break while some others will use the free time to work full-time on zing which is great. That usually means not much free time for myself, though. :D
Anyway, it's been quite a weird year but with things opening up in terms of funding through curation rewards on @zingtoken and purchases of alpha vials there's been a sense of relief and new motivation coming into the scene. I mentioned the other day when someone stated that the recent hive pump was an important one and more people should've said something rather than being quite in the particular chat that maybe most people are just busy building things and aren't looking too much at prices. Devs don't care about prices as they say. What I followed up with however was that I've been so focused on holozing the past year that seeing hive do better gives me a bigger sense of relief for its funding rather than my finances, you know, being all-in hive in forever.
With this post I'd like to lay down some potential futures of where I'd see holozing in and potentially start to work at in 2025 and beyond. Keep in mind however that we're going to approach this quite respectfully, if these markets have told us anything is that they continue to be unpredictable - even when btc and eth were doing better, most including hive did not up until the very end of 2024.
First and foremost, we hope to launch the beta of the game in early 2025, this will however be a soft-launch with potentially only a limited amount of daily wild creature encounters. This means that players will be able to set a time when they want their encounters to occur based on their timezone, say for instance if I'd prefer my daily encounters to happen between 6 and 8 pm (there'll most likely be a minimum to prevent back-to-back encounters), I could have them happen then at random times between those two hours rather than stressing about missing out encounters when I should be focusing on other things - okay not me personally maybe since I mainly sit at home but for instance students and people working real jobs not to get distracted or in trouble. :P
For this soft-launch to happen, we still need to enable opening of vials and minting of healers. With healers our current plans are to "copy" how splinterlands minted Runi's, meaning the minting would occur on ethereum and open us up to more traffic and visibility by for instance being able to mint and view your assets on opensea.io. This of course will mean a little inconvenience from hivers having to use another chain and wallet extension to mint a holozing healer, but with generative nft collections it's important there's only one copy of them and easier for them to exist on one chain - however who knows what @vsc will allow us to do once we're able to connect hive to other chains through them. Either way, I've asked @yabapmatt for some connections with devs to assist us on minting there and to figure out leasing/deleegations on hive by "staking" nft's on eth to allow for it - shouldn't be too difficult and hopefully not too expensive. This isn't us trying to say Hive doesn't have what it takes to handle the healer mint, it does and there's so much more advantages to do it here when it comes to fees, transfers, etc, but we have to face reality that Hive is quite small and launching those here would not attract as much volumes for them to have a chance to hit supply cap. Not to mention the opportunity it can give Hive in terms of traffic to bring collectors and players to this blockchain through our game and being able to earn zing and hive by participating further here.
For things between chains to work smooth we will also have to revamp holozing account creation by offering an easy signup while allowing for referral registrations so new players can quickly get an account, mint a healer on eth and link them to their holozing account, then receive a free hive account from us to also connect to take advantage of passive zing collection rewards and of course to play the game once we get there. This'll allow players to easily create an account and be able to restore passwords/login info and potentially even use fiat to purchase a healer and alpha vial or things from the marketplace while remaining a web2 account. For this to work and to make it fair for fiat players we will also have to simulate their earning experience, for instance if someone purchases an alpha vial with fiat or other crypto than hive through a payment service, and they open the vial up to have their creatures and items, they should still earn zing like everyone else despite not having a hive account connected yet - that zing can't just be "extra inflation" so it'll need to participate in the same distribution as current zing while remaining "virtual zing". This can be done by having a specific account we create claim zing and note down who it belongs to and how much, other things would still work the same such as unstaking or burning/using zing in-game, except that they won't be able to trade it for other crypto or fiat - for that they'll be required to "upgrade" to a hive account. For accounts that only have metamask connected we'll allow them to trade zing and receive it in different coins/tokens on their metamask.
As you can tell there's still quite some stuff to do but these are just things on the horizon, so let's dive a bit into the future if things go well popularity-wise for holozing.
I've already done some groundwork and planning for a physical card collection for holozing and have some contacts in wait for us to pull the trigger on a web2 crowdfunding campaign. Being diverse and in many places is a good thing I believe, especially if all roads lead back to Hive eventually. I'm not going to go too deep into this, but the idea is quite simple. Create quality physical card collection - initially non-playable, just collector's edition - with amazing artwork in different formats and rarities of our creatures and healers. Limited supply edition which will come with certain perks - pulling rare cards will grant you a digital copy of healers and creatures that you can lay claim on our website. In simple terms, collector's of the physical cards would be able to get much of the same advantages as players on web3 do while allowing web3 to be opt-in. Don't want to sell your zing you've collected by claiming your digital copies from your rare cards? That's fine, don't. Changed your mind? Upgrade to a hive account to remove the limitations of trading zing and your assets. The idea is that the digital copy versions of the cards will have to be rare enough so the cost of the physical cards would match what people on hive have paid for an alpha vial and healer mint. I.e. if a pack of cards costs $10, you'll most likely need ~5 packs to average out on getting a rare healer card or starter creature card to get a digital copy from it to let you play the game. There's still some things to iron out here with this idea, primarily what happens to your digital copy if your physical copy gets stolen/traded. Simply idea is that whenever the qr code card that's in every pack gets rescanned on a new account we have to assume it was traded - but potentially have a time window to allow for reports saying otherwise available - keep in mind the digital copy from the cards won't be an actual nft, just let you do what the nfts do, i.e. play the game while collecting real or virtual nfts and tokens until you opt-in for them becoming real.
Lastly what I want to bring up today, would be that Holozing will be a media franchise. We'd want it to flourish in many different mediums all the while encouraging players to become socially active on hive and take advantage of the things we've gotten used to here. I already have a second smaller game in mind to allow players to use the same assets from the first game there as well - while this one won't take as long to create we haven't started on that yet as our focus currently is our flagship game.
We'd also like to co-operate with others in creating official merchandise for holozing while allowing buyers to register for an account and trial of our games. Along with looking for story writers and artists to start us off on our very own manga/webtoon which may then open up doors for anime/other and cover as much ground as possible while making the experience of our players more valuable than things existing in web2. I believe that having launched the project the way we have has given a lot of unique people the chance to participate and take advantage of having skin in the game while at the same time the risk having been quite low since most of the early distribution has occurred through hive power delegations. There are for instance many earning zing I know personally have earned their HP by being social and now have quite a lot of zing which seems very low-risk to them and they're quite excited for the future of the project. Compared to say web2 where only venture capital and angel investors are able to get in early while more often than not selling onto the people wanting to get in later with propped up prices on exchange listings who also receive a big supply along with founders and team having a big supply they've given themselves.
We have a lot of advantages when it comes to that based on how we've started and we want to keep it fair and focus on the value staying with people that crowdfunded it and continuously stay vested and active either by being social, playing or trading and in the future potentially more ways to get involved.
Anyway, just some thoughts and wishful thinking at best at this point in time, but I truly believe we have quite a unique proposition with the project, a cool idea that's different to many other games and projects along with fairness and web3 advantages that have never been seen before by players and collectors, all made possible cause of Hive. I'm quite excited for 2025!
and please, don't take this as financial advice, stay safe and earn some by simple hp delegation which has been profitable since we launched, meaning you would've been able to earn most of the Hive you forfeited to zingtoken through missed curation rewards back had you traded your zing + had some extra zing leftover for the game. Or just stay active being social on chain and earn your rewards to participate that way, Hive is unique as it creates some cool circular economies that way, make use of it but stay within community etiquette!