Holozing was first announced on October 17th last year, and launched on October 21st. We may not realize it, but as of today we are in year 2 of Holozing's existence.
Until a few days ago, the funding mechanism for the project was mainly through delegated HIVE Power curation, and an initial investment from the Posh project which was recouped.
People could have earned the token of the game, ZING, as rewards for:
- delegating HIVE Power
- staking ZING
- providing liquidity in the SWAP.HIVE-ZING diesel pool
- having POSH in their account (now discontinued)
- completing the first achievement in the game
They could have also purchased it from the market, and some did amass important quantities of ZING this way or by delegating huge amounts of HP at the beginning.
I'm still relatively unclear what ZING's role in the game will be (most likely it will be used to purchased consumables like food, water, elixirs, potions, and capturing ammo), but it wasn't used to purchase the first packs that were put into sale, the alpha vials, which is a good thing, because most of the funding will come from outside the game instead of circulating and reinvesting the same game rewards. Sure, someone could sell ZING into HIVE and buy alpha vials, but it's not a direct option.
The alpha vials were put into sale a few days ago, and I found out from one of my refs @relf87 before I had the chance to see the Shop on the website or the announcement.
I had been waiting for the alpha vial sales for a while now, but I had to adapt, because I had saved in HIVE thinking it would go up in price (which it eventually will), instead of HBD, and now I was very reluctant to pay HIVE for the vials. And I didn't. I purchased my discounted vial as soon as I had enough HBD from my author rewards, and I will buy a few more once my HBD withdrawal from savings comes through.
312 alpha vials sold so far at the time of writing. I expect that number to grow as I know other people have been withdrawing from HBD in savings to make their purchases. It is also interesting that there isn't a max amount of alpha vials to be purchased, and the number of vials in existence (and respectively, alpha items after vial opening) will be determined by the demand until beta is released. That will make this number quite an enigma for someone who wanted to buy many of them early and decide how many to buy by how many they could be at max.
Soon (I expect this may be a matter of days) the alpha vials we purchase will count toward collection rewards, with a much higher weight than the one achievement we have now. For that to happen, an additional 100k ZING will be added to rewards daily for collection rewards compared to 1k now for achievements.
In discord, @acidyo mentioned that alpha vials will be openable within a month, and the beta launch of the game is still months away. But from what I read in previous communications, the game could be tested earlier, first by a select few and then publicly(?) or by a wider number of willing players, but still in alpha.
We also should keep in mind we also need to purchase healers (at least one) at a later date. When the pricing was presented some time ago, alpha vials were 20$ and healers were 50$. We see alpha vials stuck to that pricing. Of course, with the achievement's max discount for the first vial, that's 13.8 HBD, and it would be 34.5 HBD for the first healer.
After one year, many of us are still hanging in there and waiting patiently for Holozing. They haven't hurried the release of something half-baked, just to get something out, and if the game will be as interesting as Acid makes it look, I bet it would have success outside Hive, which would be great for our ecosystem. That is one of their objectives from what I could see: to make Holozing successful outside Hive too, and even for some Web 2 gamers (otherwise they wouldn't have consulted with other projects and companies about the sentiment of Web 2 gaming community toward Web 3, as we found out from this post).
Without a game launched yet, this is still very early, as much as some may think it's not after one year since the original announcement.
You can still join right now and be early. This is the website:
https://holozing.com
If you want to use my referral link, this is it:
https://holozing.com?ref=gadrian