Whenever there’s a bad market, people starting talking about the projects differently. This is not Pixels first market where there’s a correction, but in worse markets, this is when teams who have something to prove end up winning. Last Bear market in 2022-2023, no one believed in Pixels. We came from this no-name team to being a leader in Web3 gaming. So what’s great is we’re in a spot where we can take risks and bets, and keep working on our thesis. We do believe we can solve P2E gaming.
Nobody earns in Web2 gaming. We view Web3 gaming as 20-30% advantage against Web2 games. We want $PIXEL to be THE P2E token. We aren’t abandoning the core game. It’s our best chance to get to sustainable P2E. We do need to make the game better. The state of the core Pixels game right now is we wouldn’t have the same metrics as we do if we didn’t have Web3. We really focused on the Web3 elements before the Web2 elements, but both are super important. We need to have a game that people will play even without the Web3 elements, but we’re not there.
We have to make the game better, so that means we need to add in features aside from just task board. Our focus is pushing out things like Merchant Ships, speed ups, First time experience updates, new automated live ops, Chapter 3 etc. We still need to work on fixes and making the game feel good, but we have to think about ways to bring end-game content as well.
Pet app is close to getting done. Early access maybe later this month or first thing next month. First version will go out to NFT holders. We want to build a Web2 trojan horse. This app can reach millions of users in Web2. But if we can enhance the app by 20-30% by implementing Web3 elements, that’ll be amazing.
PD has burnt over 1.5M $PIXEL in the last week. We’re going to start to add other games that aren’t related to Pixels into the Pixels Ecosystem as well. Market is down, so the token price is down but we’re still at a significant market cap vs most other web3 tokens right now. Most other games still can’t compete with that, which is an interesting sell to join the Pixels ecosystem. We might start to give other games $PIXEL token to acquire users, and the deal is to give us some data back to build out our P2E models. Will have official staking documents out by mid-month.
Staking should be out by late month or early April. We have similar thesis to G7 and B3. But we have advantages with actual games and partners that are live and coming into the ecosystem too. We’re still in very strong positions for that.
Q&A
Q: When governance timelines? Will Pixels team be allowed to touch Pixel Foundation’s tokens without approval from the public? M&A’s Luke has been speaking about: how will they be funded? From what money? Team money or “Community” money.
We’ve been sending all revenue in game to the community treasury. 20% gets sent back to ecosystem rewards, 80% to treasury. We’re working on the stages of governance. We’re helping to set up a DAO, structure and legal entity. What would not be so good if the community voted on putting all the tokens all at once into the market. That would not be good, so there’s some guard rails we can add to protect against that. Community Treasury is the community’s choice. The team has no tokens yet, so wont have until March 15th so we’ll be part of the governance. Foundation has its own allocation of tokens. It’s an independent organization. The foundation’s mission statement is to solve and grow P2E. A good example of a foundation initiative was the Pixel Dungeons publishing deal. So the foundation has allocation in both ecosystem and treasury. So the foundation has its own treasury to make moves like that.
Q: More details on staking, pls
It’s kinda hard to visualize it. We’re working on making it very easy to see how it works. You can kinda view what the Pixels ecosystem is as its own network. The pixels ecosystem is a network trying to grow just like any other network. They’re secured by stakers who provide security through validators. Our network is secured by good data. In order for the Pixels ecosystem to succeed, we need to make sure rewards are going out to people who help grow out the ecosystem. Bots are really bad for the ecosystem. They’re anti-RORS. Giving tokens to bots hurts us. Our goal is to get a RORS over 1 as quickly as possible. If we hit over 1, we can start to sell some of this AI stuff we’re working on to other teams. We’ve been focused on the Data Science side. When we give out rewards to people, what do they do with them? So how staking is going to work is we need more data from more games, so you’re going to start to see other games join the ecosystem. You’re going to be able to stake $PIXEL to these other games, and when we allow games to join, they’ll act like a validator or a node. So when you go out to stake, you can choose a game to stake to. Core Pixels, Pixel Dungeons, Pixel Pet Game, or third party games that we aren’t launching but will join our ecosystem. And you’ll get a portion of the monetization these games have as a return. We want to create win-win-win scenarios when we’re bringing on games to our ecosystem.
Q: When Pixels Ronin validator
Some may be excited to see that we started spinning up a validator this week. This belongs to the core Pixels game. Rewards from the validator will be used to augment the Pixels staking as well. You might also get rep if you stake to the validator.
Q: Wen Ronke?
We’re working on it. Just waiting on the art. Then it’ll be live. Integrating meme coins into guilds, there might be something there without taking away from the Guild Shards.
Q: Do you consider increasing the taskboard rewards since MP items have also become more expensive?
So that was intentional. Inflation is fun until it’s not. People keep bringing up $BERRY but it was inflating at 3% a day. $BERRY was a ticking time bomb, and there was also resource inflation inside of the game.
Some of the issues around land and the gameplay right now - they weren’t working in the way we intended. We had to attack the supply side. People loved inflation for a long time. Coin inflation and resource inflation is actually pretty under control now.
But there’s also the demand side. So we’re working on more end-game features. We’ll have more T3 & T4 resources appear on people’s taskboards even if they’re not at the level. We’re going to experiment and see if it works. But we also need to fix this properly by giving you more compelling reasons to play the game in the long-run too. The end goal in merchant ships is to give you more things to play towards aside from just taskboard. We’re also focused on Chapter 3 with more end game content. There might be something like a T5 resource generator on a contestable land. Contestable lands are not on-chain, and are limited. Chapter 3 is around 3-6 months out. If we wanted to add combat, that could be around 9 months out in maybe a Chapter 4.
We’ve been talking about a lot of other features too. There’s also short-term fixes - like there’s not much recipe depth inside the game, and there’s not a lot of cross-pollination for different recipes inside the game. The team’s basically working on that now. This is prioritized in the short-term.
Q: Why Pixels does not work in big social media like Instagram?
We started working on this Pixels Mindshare thing. It might go live at the end of the week. We’re scraping content being posted about us on Twitter. The idea is to reward content creation on diff platforms. X/Twitter was the easiest one to work on. But we agree that’s probably not the best long-term platform. Not like instagram or tiktok. We need to build an audience of users who love the game we’re building in the Web2 sense. That’s one big advantage of the pet app. The plan with the Pet app is to gate earning mechanisms until very late, like eg. a login streak of 180 days. We’re going to push growth towards Web2 audience. We do need to go out and attack other Web2 audiences. Core Pixels is not where it needs to be yet. The team is pushing it towards a Web2 state for the next 3-6months. Our onboarding is crazy and not good. There’s something like 82 steps in our onboarding flow right now, which is crazy in Web2 gaming. Web2 games have like 10 steps and 30 seconds tops because of the attention span. Web3 is crazy in terms of audience and put up with stuff that Web2 gamers would never put up with.
Q: What a boring longterm
Sometimes it’s not as flashy, but the real thing we’re working with the long-term is the fundamentals. The Heroes always win in the long-run eventually right? We’re trying to build something that works. We’re not building a ponzi game or mechanic. Web2 games go out and build revenue then become profitable. We have a Web3 model where we can reward players in the game and ecosystem. We have to look at profitability from the token perspective. We need to make the game as good as possible. If we’re able to solve this P2E and RORS problem, there’s a lot of people who need this model. Maybe it’s boring, but we’re trying to build something that works and we have a pretty good shot.
Q: When update soils, LOs have almost no income from land, really sad
We want to make sure there’s a needle-moving update every week. Soils is a needle-moving update. We have been updating weekly, which is an improvement from a couple months ago, but now we have to make sure we’re doing the right things weekly. Things like the windmill, or T3/T4 in the TB. How do we get updates out like this every week? Number one prio inside the company is building out the right things.
Q: If we can use code for discount for buying coins, is tehre any way we can also use code for buying VIP in the future? When?
That’s already in.
Q: When sword, bow, magic fights on Pixels?
It’s gonna be more economic gameplay. We’re working on a new feature where you have to go out and search for these contestable lands out there. Think the framing is going to be something like space ship. But we’re still working on themes. Core concept is new mechanic where you build something and go send out missions to find contestable lands. Another thing we talked about is looking at new features with automation. Experimenting with an AI agent inside the game. But the tech we’re building might be used towards an AI agent that maybe helps you farm. We have to see if this is the right way to do it. I love these mechanics but the higher priority in the short-medium term is getting out more content that’s not just taskboard, then maybe we can focus on things like that
Q: When choco sauce bottle in MP?
It’s something we’ve been talking about internally
Q: When Spore Sports S3?
We have a full team for Live Ops, and we’re looking at repeatable events. We’ll discuss options for Spore Sports, but there’s nothing solidly planned as we need to discuss this internally first.
Q: Will $PIXEL go back to $0.5 of it’s the new $SLP
Team is here. We’re incentivized. That’s all we can say. We can’t talk about token price. But the team is incentivized.
Q: You always say that Pixel team is doing a great job, but none of us have no idea who is in your team. Perhaps you need to introduce some of your game developers?
Sorry, you guys lost that privilege with all the death threats you’ve sent. The team was full-time 12 when we got to TGE. We had one of the most successful gaming launches but it caught up to us. We have original grinders on the team, but we also have new team members who come from an amazing Web2 background. We wish we could have them be more involved but we have to protect them because Web3 is a brutal place.
Q: There are some concerns that the event is favorable for bots and autoclickers. Can you maybe explain the impact of the bot prevention tech during and after the event on the leaderboard?
There’s a class of people who will make huge multiaccounts (like 1000) and take advantage of an event that way. There’s another class of cheater that uses autoclickers. There’s two different ways to detect and look at that. All of this is much easier when you have a list of people and we can look at these players after the event. We’ll do as much as we can in real-time prevention, but there will be time after to look through the leaderboard. One of the easier ways to detect a bot is to see what they do with their end-result. Bots try to min-max their earnings. Even if someone creates a bot, we really nerf their earnings inside the game now. If a bot is able to make money inside the game, then they’ll keep trying to do it. If you nerf their earnings, that’s the best way to handle it. We’ve banned millions of bot accounts, and we have a lot of accounts labeled bot/not-bot inside of the game. We use prediction on bot-accounts to nerf earnings. So for HH, we’ll do a deep dive into leaderboard earners, it gives us a much narrower target to look at.
Q: So Luke is not loyal in Pixel anymore?
I tell people I haven’t received a single $PIXEL token and people think that’s bearish? All the team will get monthly installations of their token over the next 3 years. Idk how you can interpret that as anything but extremely bullish because that means the team’s here for the long-term. We’re here for the long-term and we’re building out for the long-term.
Excited for the future, let's grow!!!!
Future seems steady.