This is probably the most fearful the markets in the macro have been. It’s worse than FTX which is crazy. Crypto’s in a spot where everything gets affected by macro. Macro affects crypto and crypto affects this game. But Pixels is here for the long-run. We want to build the best game possible. The team has the runway to build, and we’re still excited to build.
Bad Markets, sometimes companies can outperform. Right now, we’re not in a position to be extreme exceptions, and not really anyone in the market is. If you look at 30D gains across crypto, there’s only 1 or 2 coins that are positive which is crazy. But that doesn’t mean we couldn’t be an exceptional company. Bad markets expose your faults and there’s less tolerance for mistakes. There’s a few things we’ll start to introduce soon. Staking is coming. We want to expand the ecosystem. We had our first announcement last week with an awesome announcement with Forgotten Runiverse. FR is a game on Ronin that went live a week or two ago. It’s another Pixelated MMO game but it’s very different from Pixels. The idea here is to give more ways to earn and use the $PIXEL token.
Basically the deal is, FR get $PIXEL token to use, and they have to use the token inside the game. If they don’t hit a certain amount of purchase inside the game with the $PIXEL token, then transparently, the deal is subject to change. And with staking, you’ll be able to stake your $PIXEL to whichever game you want. Rewards will be going to people depending on the economic activity of the game.
Right now, we send 80% of the $PIXEL to the community treasury, but that’s going to change to the people who are staking $PIXEL to Pixels. Same thing is going to happen for the other games. All the $PIXEL spend in Forgotten Runiverse, a portion of it goes back to stakers of their game. So if Core Pixels is not competitive against these other games in the ecosystem, then that’s a problem so we have to remain competitive.
Ideally, we get staking out next week. It might be the week after, but it will go live in April. It’s going to change the game a bit. When we have staking out, there will be another thing coming too. Withdrawal Taxes. One cool thing we’re going to be doing is making the in-game balance staked for you. We’ll stake the in-game balance to Core Pixels for you. So you’ll be able to earn $PIXEL just by having it in-game. Also there will be a withdrawal fee for withdrawing in-game $PIXEL to on-chain $PIXEL. Withdrawal fees are going to be more aggressive than some people are expecting even. The revenue or all of the fees generated in-game, even through the withdrawal fees, are going to be given to stakers. So this is a way to reward players who don’t want to just sell $PIXEL. It’s a way to align the long-term interest of the game and the players a little more too. Also in the future (hopefully in May) there will be a new reward token that you can withdraw, pay no fees to withdraw, and it’ll be a spend or stake only token. Withdraw fees will be quite aggressive for normal F2P players. But it’ll be lower with more reputation.There will probably be tiers of VIP coming soon as well. But the easiest way to increase the reputation is holding land.
Q: How will land work with staking? It’s not a fixed amount of $PIXEL to stake unlike the token itself
A: immediately, what land will do when it comes to rewards - it’s going to be the easiest way to lower your Withdrawal Tax. That’ll be the first utility there. For the in-game staked balance, we might be able to play around with giving some boost for land ownership but it’ll probably be coming from the in-game pool.
Q: The player balance to direct staking will come in V1?
A: Yes, if you have an in-game balance, we make sure it’s backed 1:1.
Q: P2A for FR finishes and folks, and tons of bots got billions of quanta… how is this supposed to help pixels token if they can get instant liquidity from pixels..
A: FR and any partner is expected to return a certain amount of economic activity… or the rewards spend inside to stakers inside the game. There’s a loop there that’s interesting, but there’s good alignment with people who hold the token, and those who use the token inside the game. Staking to that game is how that game gets rewards.
Q: Can we ask about MS, how it performs so far, any insight and also will chase items be purchaseable via Buoy or its just rotating for those kind of items
A: The performance has been pretty decent. It’s contributing to a decent amount of $PIXEL spend, but anecdotally, it’s a good feature in some aspects. Some players are in a state where it’s about how much profit they can make. But a lot of the work the Pixels team will be doing is focusing on players who like the game, and like the features. There’s earn-motivated players, players who would stick around with no earnings, and both. I view earnings as a powerful tool, but when we’re building features, the earn people are important, but the ones who love the game.
Q: Please put some good items in rotating stores. Currently all items are useless
A: More is coming, but this is a large focus that we need to zone in on. The rewards need to get better and more useful in the long-run.
So when I think about MS in the long run, we want rewards to feel worth it. Not just because of ROI but because I want it. We’re finally in the stage of Pixels where we can focus more on the social features inside the game. Focusing on UGC-type features. We’re doing exploratory work. Extra bookmarks, speed ups or tools that are more efficient..And we don’t have to have all of the chase content to be oriented around land-owner content. It’s been the easiest, and a lot of the chase content was built around lands, but we need to build it out more so there’s other things to get.
We need to create content that makes the game more fun than it is now, and provide compelling end-game content. So the things you might want more than just $PIXEL, will need to be able to do things.
Q: Luke, fix recipe quantity because resource flooding in the market in game
A: Yeah now we have to do some things to attack some coin farming in the game. There’s some Data science and tweaks we have and can do. Recipe tweaks is part of this. We have to change our approach to in-game trading. You might see some changes to reputation, and more aggressive fees when it comes to reputation. One example is some of the resources are getting flooded in-game from low level resources.
Q: Will the new milk recipes appear in the TB?
A: They should be, they’ll go into TB or MS. Ideally you’re going to get new recipes every week over the next month or so. We’re slowly releasing recipes. There’s a lot of gaps between level unlocks. We’re trying to close gaps and create consistent content for the entire gameplay. They’ll be centered around every type of industry and skill, and released week by week.
Q: Yeah because there’s not much story or ways to care about the Pixels world. Deepen and richen this aspect.
A: Yeah, this should be a change for our live ops strategy. We’ve said no more high-fidelity holiday events. I think all of our events from now on should be around story, lore or narrative like MMOs. MMOs usually add live ops and then they stay in the game, so we’re switching that up a bit.
Q: Could you add mini-games like avrenim suggested?
A: Things are coming. A certain building in TV is under construction. That’s all we’ll sa]y
Q: More rewards for more held pixel in game?
A: That’s essentially how it works. If you have in-game $PIXEL, itll be staked. Staking is on-chain, so you *could* withdraw it and go stake it, but we’ll just stake your $PIXEL balance on behalf of users instead. Just by having $PIXEL in game, you’re already staking.
Q: You’re now giving T4 pixels tasks to lower levels, do they receive T4 coin tasks too?
A: T4 tasks and more T3/T4 tasks is something that was very requested by the LO community. There might be something there about surfacing more coin tasks, but there’s CPP being different for different players - so we’ll be looking at more of that too.
Q: About T4/T3 coin task, was to balance the coin task, since high level have higher cpp vs low level which doesn’t make sense
A: Yeah we’ll take a look at that again, but there’s some pretty easy levers we can pull. We’re looking at it with both coin and $PIXEL earnings. We can cut down some early item inflation and it’ll feel much more worth it to earn some of these coin tasks. But it might make things more expensive if part of your game loop is just going to the market and buying things. We need to be building our features for people who actually like the game and want to see the game be as good as possible. If we focus too much on how to optimize earnings features, then we’re not going to accomplish our long-term goals.
Q: So no Easter event?
A: We’re redesigning our live ops events to make them continuous, reusable stuff. So if we do holiday events, it’s going to be chill. So there might be something for Easter, just a little more chill. Part of what we’re going to be doing is automating live ops events more so they’re very consistent when we do them too. We’ll have stricter requirements for the templates.
Q: Ads it has proven will helpful for your game.
A: Yeah we just surfaced our first ad for Pixel Dungeons. The hard part about building a Web3 browser game, is there’s not a lot of people who want to advertise in a Web3 game. Now for a mobile game, that’s much easier to build ads in. Like the Pets app. Which is coming along much better now. June is the target.
