AMA Mar 26 2025

Accountability & Vision of Pixels

State of the game. Things going well, and things going wrong. There’s a lot of things to work on in the core game. Internally, we’re thinking about how to take the next 6 months - changing things about our objectives. Things like Live Ops. We keep making mistakes in the team. We’ll also talk about game and direction.

Key Concept: Pixels is trying to do a couple things at once. Building a core game, and also solve P2E. The game has to be a good game for people to want to play it, and that leads to all the secondary mechanics. Pixels is trying to build a sustainable P2E game, so we do need to think about revenue, and ins and outs of the system, but we do need to build a fun game.

The Core game is lacking right now. There’s not compelling end-game, so the game doesn’t get interesting. We’ve been filling the end-game features with Live Ops, but we’re re-questioning our strategy. There have been some things not going smoothly on the Live Ops side. This means internally, we’re considering changing some of the things we’re doing. Pixels *is* trying to make the best game possible. Core Pixels has to be the pride and joy of the whole ecosystem.

We have some exciting news coming on the ecosystem side that’s coming next week. I don’t wanna spill the beans but we have some big game features shipping, and you’ll start to see the $PIXEL token being used in other games.

If you’ve been part of Pixels for a long time, you’ve seen us be transparent to a point that’s not helpful. And the past 2 weeks, we’ve had a lot of mistakes. For eg. the pet smarts were supposed to go out with 25, but as soon as we recognized the mistake, we immediately changed. This was upsetting because we announced it 24 hours after, and that’s on us. These are obvious mistakes that we should have no tolerance for.

Team should move fast, ship and break things often. Scopely spent 4-5 years building out Monopoly Go. It’s an interesting game, because when you play it, you don’t think there’s anything special. But it takes really long to get things perfect and right. But that doesn’t work in Web3 gaming. When we talk about new features, the speed of releasing features is important. But the mistakes we’ve made are not acceptable.

When it comes to rewards, live ops etc, these are easy mistakes that are causing us to lose trust. We have high tolerance for mistakes on task board, merchant ships, etc because those are mistakes we need to make. Just really rethinking we need to change strategy on live ops where these easy mistakes are happening.

Another mistake was the sculptures - you were able to put more than 2 per land. Sloppy mistake, shouldn’t have happened. There were mistakes about the pouch rewards, and we wanted to address all of them.

NotPlusOne: Just get someone whose sole role is to quality control everything.. and actually grinds the game

We do have QC and amazing people on the team, and sometimes they’re just ignored which is unfortunate. This is a huge issue. If we’re not listening to players on these things, then that’s a huge problem. We need to make sure both of us are aligned. The reason you guys still show up to these AMAs is because you still have faith in Pixels. So when we’re looking at core game in Pixels. Live Ops creates a buffer while we work on other game things.

MentMining | TFG: I can get you a list of so many loose ends in game which needs to be fixed before we get any new content. Please don’t ad more more more and make things worse

In order to fix some of the loose ends in the game, we need to fix end-game content. We need more than TB. TB is the game right now, and it’s a fine feature in some aspects. We believe a lot of the work needs to go into the game, whether it’s more social content etc. Merchant Ships isn’t going to fix the game, but it’s one end-game content needed for the game. How do we get more of the players who really care about the game to be more involved inside the design of the game? UGC was a good feature, and maybe we can implement some things to allow users to create creative UGC Content.

We want to make it really easy for other games to use the $PIXEL token. Now for core game, there’s still a lot to do. We need to make the game more fun with more end-game content. We have to think about strategy. Moving the game into more of a F2P mobile style route. When we say F2P, we mean more features aligned with best-in-class mobile strategies. But some of the Live Ops things we’ve been doing has not been as effective as it could be. We also want to templatize the Live Ops events so we can run them 24/7. But we’re questioning if that’s the right approach. Maybe we move to some more long-standing content, like quests and narrative. I want to rethink the direction of the core game.

If more people are willing to use $PIXEL inside the game, then we can give out more earnings. If the game’s not in a spot where it needs to be, then earnings, spend etc comes. We have to try some things, make changes to the economy. But feedback will really help over the next month or two while we rethink strategy. If your feedback is I should earn more, then that’s not helpful.

There’s 4 different spots around TV, snap a picture of yourself in all 4 spots with the hashtag #pixelsgiving, and post it on Twitter. Fun way to win a pet! It will probably be a Clover Clash pet.

Q: You can stake RON to the validator now..
A: When you stake RON to the Pixels validator, we’ve put the commission to go back to the players. So if you stake Pixels to the core Pixels game, we’re giving the RON back to the stakers. That’s the long-term plan with staking. We want to share returns by giving it back to the players. I think every game will be P2E in 10 years. There’s a few companies doing Reward to Play (incentivized traffic) really well. This is something happening in Web2 right now. Higher Payouts are set to reach level practice. This is the kind of concept we’re bringing to Web3. AdJoe made 100M in revenue last year. The Web3 model could be an extremely competitive version to this. But we need games you love and want to spend. We want Pixels to be the flagship game, and we want the game to be in as good of a position as possible. We need to give games more reasons to join the Pixels ecosystem, and give everyone a way to vote on which game they want to stake on.

Q: You’ve been talking about merchant ships for 4 months, are you sure they didn’t sink?
A: MS is one of those features where again, sometimes features end up taking longer than they’re supposed to. That sucks and you don’t want that to happen. Even games that seem very simple on the surface take long. MS took longer than we wanted it to, and we had some internal issues. If we were building in a closed ecosystem, it would’ve been fine. Team directive internally is to get important updates every single week. I don’t care if updates going out every week are not important. We’re really trying to release it next week but this is where we need grace. MS is a new feature and it might not be perfect when it releases. This is the type of feature where it’s okay if it doesn’t release perfectly on release. We will improve it with actual FB from the community live. If we mess up a pet trait, it’s on chain and messy to change. If we release a feature with a reward people don’t want, we can fix that. We’ve released 4 TB updates in the last week and a half. MS is gonna be viewed that way too. It’s a good nice to have feature that’s a step better towards the end-game. Chapter 3 is gonna be more compelling end-game too, just so you’re not only focusing on the TB.

Q: Hey please introduce more gameplay into the pixel world, like sharing resources between cities and accessing exclusive resources in PvE or PvP modes. I have many more ideas.
Yeah, land gameplay is not as compelling as it used to be. Ch1 was very unsustainable when it came to resource inflation. We knew it was gonna bite us in the butt if we didn’t make changes. Coin/RSS Inflation is now in a relative better spot. There’s a few things we need to do re Coin OTC market, so we’re going to experiment with some stuff there. But now we need to focus on some end-game features and go through tweaks and requests to make land gameplay compelling. I like to view Land as a Pixels end-game. F2P and non-LO should want Land. It unlocks more gameplay than owning a speck does. Lands are multiplayer, and helps manage guilds, etc. We had to fix economy which led to resource production nerfing in the long-term. QuickSilver is one of those features that was a good step in the right direction.
Earnings: We should reward players who help Pixels grow and help make Pixels better. Taskboard is one way to reward players. But QuickSilver and Creator Codes are also different types of features that help to reward players who help Pixels grow. QuickSilver works in an odd way too! People who have rare industries should get more rewards. Those aren’t easy to get, and they take some risk getting them too. But also, QuickSilver is missing on respecting NFT Trait rarity too. That should probably be a more important part of the game economy.

Q: Luke what do you think about the progress of the LO rerug… excuse me, unrug project? Unfortunately I can think/see of less and less things that would help the situation…
A: I do want to assure you that one thing we need less is the doom and gloom. We’re taking feedback on things we need to improve on. Chapter One: the game economy was not in as good of a spot. We’re getting closer and closer to sustainability. Now we can rethink how to bring back utility to these traits, utility to land and make them more compelling too.

Q: How do you get the Ramadan oufit?
A: They’re gonna be available in the store for 10 $PIXEL, similar to other events we’ve done. They will be available for tomorrow’s event

Q: Pixel Tips and his OTC market is part of coin inflation problem…
A: We’re rethinking the strategy of pricing, and making our pricing more competitive. App tokens are made by limit break - ERC-721C was made by Limit break as well. They’re ways to add rules to tokens. Which is interesting. They’re for decentralized tokens. I can’t talk too much about it, but we need some step function changes into some of our approaches. We’re going back to some of the drawing board, keeping the same long-term vision, but we need to rethink our core features to tweak and make them better. $BERRY was unsustainable by inflating 3% a day. It was subsidized by Pixels blowing up at the time, but it was a ticking time bomb. Now app tokens are interesting because we may be able to put coins on chain with some rules. We have the system in place to get those things in place, but we have to do it different from $BERRY if we bring it on-chain. Something we’ve thought a lot about as well, is we could reward not just staking, but holding the token more too. Imagine if you earned a $PIXEL token inside the game, and we gave you more $PIXEL for holding the token. You get rewarded for it, and it helps cut some of that loop for people who earn and withdraw immediately, and don’t help the game grow in the right way. There’s interesting things we’re looking into there. That’ll increase trust

Q: Will you guys allow artists to create series of outfits, UGC and other stuff can be a future event like Valentine, CNY, Harvest Hustle and can be seen in game?
A: I love that idea a lot. These are the things we need to do more. We can accelerate some of our ideas by giving it over to players. This is a great example of an area where players want to help, and we should be making that possible

Q: I’m happy with the latest updates, but I’d like to know what they’re planning to do to attract new players, because the gameplay is boring for a new player
A: Yeah I agree. In order to release on the appstore, the Web2.5 model of Pixels is very beneficial to the app store, I want to see other teams release so we can see what we need to do, but we’re in a good spot to be able to have an app store friendly app. Pets App: We wont require Pixels Login to play the game, but we will require it if you want to earn rewards. Might give you $PIXEL reward for something, then connect your app after. That’s an example of a New player experience that makes it mobile friendly.

Q: Here we go again - farm hands with exclusive access. And everyone else at a disadvantage
A: We don’t necessarily give Farm Hands exclusive access. And if they do receive it, these are Pixels representatives that are expected to perform and behave in a way that represents the community. They have a hard job, moderation, testing, etc. I really dislike this attitude because this is not true. I think more people would want to help us test things, and we should figure that out. What we’re working on right now is different staging environments where we can get people testing on. We need to figure out how to help more people help us.

Q: pixels circulating supply binance showing 2.8b is real or 1.5b near unlocking which one correct
A: The Binance number should be right. We updated our CoinMarketCap, well we pinged them. We moved all of our tokens from the genesis wallet into on-chain vesting contracts. CoinMarketCap changed the way they calculate on-chain token supply. But we filled out the forms and that should get updated. You can go see all the team, investor and advisor allocation on-chain in vesting contracts. You can even see what all these people are doing if you want to follow these wallets. All of our investors are behaving well. Our largest investors and VCs are all holding. Most of them intend to stay, which is great. What you’ll also see too is all the tokens are accounted for. One of the projects listed on Binance got in trouble for doing weird backdoor deals. But you’ll see everything is visible, on-chain, and nothing shady is going on. We did everything the right way.

Q: The best thing to do now is to stop launching pixel burning events and instead unlock the free economy. When will the pixel burning project last, until no one plays this game anymore?
A: This is the thing.. If your only focus in the game is earning as much as possible, you’re allowed to want that, but you also have to think about the long-term of Pixels. I still think there’s 5-10 years to dedicate towards Pixels. This is a long-term thing. We need to build something that works in the long-run. I have no interest in building something that isn’t fundamentally sound. The end event is sustainable economics. For that, we do need Burn inside the game. We want to make sure we’re rewarding players for different reasons. We need a playerbase and audience. But we do need users who love the game and wants to spend inside the game. So we need feedback on how to make the game better. If the game’s better, then the spend/earn will come. That’s why we’re focus on RORS so much, solving P2E etc. The prize for solving P2E is quite big. I want the people who are earning to also care about the other stuff we’re doing in the ecosystem too. You get to be a part of something bigger without spending any money. Obviously with the incentives not there, there’s no reason to hold your earnings, so we want to give some reasons to do that.

Q: Does $PIXEL in-game are also on circulating supply?
A: There’s a series of wallets that hold them and they count as circulating, yes.

Q: Luke would you say that it’s a good time to buy a land?
A: The general market - it doesn’t make sense to sell anything in crypto right now. People think the market’s bottoming out right now. We’re all influenced by the macro, so a lot of the stuff in the US economy affects a lot of this stuff. If you’ve been following the stock market, it hasn’t been performing well the last 2 months because of the macro. It’s starting to look a little bit better, but it’s not a good time to get bearish. It’s really easy to FOMO. It’s easy to get emotional in bad markets, but markets bounce up and down. Not to say the Pixels team shouldn’t be improving the game and there’s still a lot to do there. When people are bearish, it’s a time to not make emotional decisions.