Well from my understanding, because it is not directly competitive in the 1-1 sense, and they're planning to even out faction allocation once the game launches, they're actively trying to make it more fair and even to avoid exactly what you're describing. Plus once you're in control of characters (units) you have that hashing power for yourself.
Thanks for letting me know about Huntercoin - I had never heard of it. Someone else mentioned Beyond the Void as well, which I am looking into it. They seem a LITTLE different in that with Hash Rush you're actually mining Ethereum etc, not just the in-game currency/tokens, which seems the case with Huntercoin and Beyond the Void... but I am new to the other two and may be wrong. Will definitely investigate further.
I think you're wrong that "the little guy does of course" - the Hash Rush team are establishing their own mining farm and have raised a fair amount of money from the whales who get in early (presale/pre-ICO), who ultimately are the real funders of the game's development... think of the big ticket rewards on a Kickstarter - that's all they've secured for now.
Smaller investments are possible from September 13th onwards (from as little as 0.1 ETH) where everyone can get a slice. They need to incentivise the big investors now so that they can secure the funds to get this game out there.
I know it sounds like I'm straight up defending them, so I just want to be clear:
I am in no way affiliated with Hash Rush or the team, I don't get anything from them for publishing this article or writing these comments, and this is not in any way official.
Huntercoin is a legit coin that is mined in the game and traded on polo.
I do like the idea that it is a GUI cloud mining operation.
I do not like the bonuses for the whales... if you are marketing it to gamers not whales then rushcoin will have to be traded like any other coin its value should be the incentive... it is a unfair advantage that they will get a permanent hashrate regardless of difficulty on top of the 25% bonus coins they will get. I think it is naive to think that no matter what they will not pass on the cost of maintaining that permanent hashrate on to other users.
As far as the game development even crap coins like EROS raise over 10 million... they did not have to go down this road.. they are just money hungry and average users will end up having a paying for the permanent mining cost and hardware to maintain that hashrate.
As far as big ticket rewards on kickstarter those are usually symbolic if they are unattainable in the future such as meet and greets or launch parties ect.. I have never seen a kickstarter that offered a product to the rich that was never to going be obtainable by regular people, which is what rush coin is doing. By giving out gold cards that I would never have a chance of getting... so no matter how much money I would spend through the course of doing business with Rush even if it is 100k over time... these whales will always be better then me...
total turn off for me and probably many gamers.... I was mid filling out ico stuff before I realized it and now I probably will never participate in the game. I will wait for china or someone to clone the game and play on a level field with everyone else.
These are some really interesting points - thanks for sharing. I am in touch with the developers and likely have another interview coming up next week, and will ask them about these concerns you raise. Thanks for engaging and for the serious thoughts here!
So I wanted to post this for full disclosure - less than a month after posting this article I entered into discussion with the Hash Rush project leads and have been on the team for the last 2 weeks, in a marketing capacity (which also explains my lack of Steemit posts during this time). So now I am affiliated with the Hash Rush team, but was not at the time of writing either the interview or the comments before this one.