@jfuji has done a good job of explaining why we are a bit different than other games but let me elaborate and hopefully put your fears to rest.

Rising Star was a Covid lockdown project for my wife and I. My vision was to try and create a game that could help people on low incomes by making it free to play but make it fun enough to encourage more affluent players to spend some of their crypto. Obviously it is almost impossible to create a profitable business using this model but our motivation is not to make money. If it was we would have already closed down the game.

The good news is that we did actually make money during the bull market but the bad news is that now we are in a bear market hardly anyone is spending any new money in the game.

So how are we going to survive?

Well as I said we are not here to make money so we have reinvested most of the profits from to bull market in various schemes, including HBD savings, to generate a sustainable income that we can use to fund everything.
The income is not enough however to cover the reward pool so we had to reduce that.

We now have enough regular income to cover our base costs and that income will slowly grow over time to cover more and more areas.

Tokenomics

Rising Star is an experiment and like any experiment things go wrong and you learn from that. Our biggest mistake was making STARBITS an inflationary token. However we came up with a way to fix this and that is the STARPRO token which has a fixed supply (a maximum of 100 a day plus 20 to the game). New STARPRO can only be minted by burning STARBITS in Music Promoter. The lower the STARBITS price goes in relation to STARPRO the more that has to be burned.

Every new feature that we have added to the game over the last six months or so and going forward requires STARPRO either directly or indirectly. As our residual income mentioned above rises we will also be buying back more and more STARPRO.

In Conclusion

I hope this has helped to put your mind at rest and you believe in our plans moving forward. We believe that with everything we have learned in the first two and a half years of the game and the changes we have made along with new features such as "Raves" we will actually be in an even stronger position going into the next bull market whether that is next year or the year after. We have been through a crypto bear market before so we know they don't last forever!

Thanks again for your post and please let me know if you have any other questions.

Jux.

P.S. We tried ads and they made us just about enough to keep the lights on! :P

P.P.S. You should pop along to our Discord server as we are always having conversations about the future of the game. It's just a lot easier to chat in real time there.