This is the best we’ve ever felt about the team. We always get comments that the “Team is dumping” but you can look at everything on-chain. We’re here building for the long-run. And the Pixels team has not received any tokens yet. The 1 year lock date is coming (March 15th). We’ll make a public announcement on that later
It’s good that team wasn’t unlocked on day 1 when price was very high. Team has 3 years of linear emissions coming up. Same for investors. Luke is also moving his unlocks to 5 years rather than 3 years.
Incentive: Build out the best P2E possible, growing the tech and building out the space. Releasing staking in late March. When you stake $PIXEL, you can choose a specific game in the Pixels Ecosystem to stake to. Pixels has been generating revenue on the Pixels Ecosystem side. 24M in Revenue for the Ecosystem. The goal is for the Ecosystem is to grow it as big as possible. So you have to grow users, revenue etc by making the game fun and improving growth.
The more games we have in our Ecosystem, the more data we can get, and the better we can make the Ecosystem. You’re going to see other games join the Ecosystem which will share their data and help to train the P2E models. And those games could give back $PIXEL to stakers. That’s very high-level though.
Substack: We are launching our very own Substack called The Pixels Post. (shocker, you’re reading on the Substack at the moment 👀) The objective is to have one Source of Truth for all of our updates.
Pets App: You have to raise a pet with a person. The pet can potentially die. You have to feed it and take care of it multiple times a day. First build will be coming out Mid-March. First build will basically be a test stage (won’t have all the features). Will release to Pet and Land Owners first. Then we’ll integrate more later on. This app is going to be casual and is not marketed towards crypto-degens. Sush has 10m Downloads on Play store and is making millions a month. Really successful and we think we can do better when we add Web3 elements on top.
$PIXEL Reward Distribution: We started introducing new earning mechanisms in the back-end. We don’t think there’s anything wrong with playing Pixels with the intention to earn. We wanna make sure that when we’re giving earnings, it benefits the ecosystem. We view Pixels as a country - all of us in the country are all working together to solve play-to-earn. Some people in the country really believe in the mission. Some are here to get rewards then leave the country. We want to help people help us get closer to the mission. This is however still a play-to-earn. We reward players who play the game. If you’re earning rewards in Pixels, we do hope you’ll help build the Ecosystem.
Creating Content, showing up to events, spending $PIXEL in-game, having users use your Creator Code. We want to build a game that uses play-to-earn mechanics to drive the ecosystem. We also want it to stand the test of time. We’re here for the long-term, building every single day.
Spore Sports: Ends March 1st, and rewards will go out 1 week later. There will also be an energy party
Q: I appreciate new ideas, however the original game is broken still - why focus on new games before fixing what is broken?
A: We can run parallel bets. The Pixels Pet game is being run by a different team. The games industry is a tough one, and one of the issues with the Pixels positioning is people don’t know what we’re actually building. Tech has become a meme in a lot of Web3 projects. But the tech we build is actually useful. We have a game that people are playing, that we get live feedback on, that we reiterate and build new tech on. So we’re using this tech to make the game better and build out the rest in parallel. We haven’t taken any of the resources from the core Pixels team. We’ve even made the core team bigger. Key focus is still making the game as fun as possible.
Right now, game economy is in a better spot than it was 2 months ago. Task Board is something different that we can talk about later on. 2 new features are coming: Merchant Ships and Speed Ups. We have the team in-person to discuss what the future of the game is going to look like.
Intention is to come out with what the next game design year will look like. We need amazing games in the ecosystem, and building out our tools to improve these games.
Q: Tell us what you would have done different in regards to tokenomics or are you proud how it went until today? you can talk about building all you want progress is basically non-existent
We get compared to other games that haven’t even released yet. We are building something that is supposed to be massive. This is not a short-term endeavor. This is a long-term thing. The attention in crypto is short, but we’re still doing the same thing as we intended from Day 1. The one thing I would’ve done differently is maybe you do want private sale to just unlock at TGE if you’re building a token ecosystem. One thing you should do when you pick investors is make sure that they’re diamond-hands. You can go look at the reputation of our lead investors of previous rounds. But if you’re a new founder you might wanna move investor unlocks to TGE so they can sell volume if they want to. Team unlocks at TGE is dumb because you want a team that is here for the long-run. When it comes to token utility, it could’ve been better but we did do better than most teams with token utility and burn the last year. We have long-term conviction. If we solve P2E, that’s going to be rewarding and our end-goal. We’re going to build the right stuff. We’re excited.
Return on Reward Spend (RORS) looking good. We’ll post an update on this soon. In August, our RORS was 0.25. Now it looks like we’re at 0.6. When we start to combine this with ecosystem staking etc, we’re super bullish. As we experiment in the short-term, token price affects our acquisition power. We need a minimum amount of players to experiment the way we need to, but we’re looking at ratios. This is the right route for us, and when we figure this stuff out, it’ll be a big deal.
Q: Staking where on ronin? Or inside the pixel dashboard
Staking will be on-chain in Ronin. If you have $PIXEL in your game account, you’ll take it out and put it on-chain to stake. This should launch end of March/early April.
Q: numbers, numbers, numbers, I get it but its only a piece of the pie. Lost sight of the actual game
No we haven’t. We have the right team in the right place now, but we have to fix the bottleneck of speed because that is super important. Weekly AMAs are hard if you’re building a game. Every AMA, I would love to come with a game update, but it’s different than where we were before on a team of 10. We have a team of 30 now. Chapter 2 was broken when we brought it to the new team, but we’re in a good place now. If we’re slow on updates, we’re going to die. So we do need to speed this up. Almost everyone on the team is focused on core game.
Q: Luke is introducing staking as if it would be something completely new and amazing tech lmao. They had 1 year and did nothing meanwhile let token dump -95%
Yeah so again, what we’re doing with staking is pretty novel. Staking is debt if you do it in the wrong way. You’re moving your emissions from doing anything for user acquisition to going to staking rewards. You’ll have utility debt. We’re in a spot where we have been generating revenue, so we can use that for staking emissions. The stuff we’re doing is genuinely unique and will actually be helpful in solving P2E. If you really believe in Web3, you’ll believe in what we’re doing. We’re showing the work and progress we’re making towards solving this. I’ve never been more confident that we’re going to get there.
Q: What was the update with the mines?
There was no update with the mines. There was a backend fix but nothing changed for gameplay with the mines.
Q: When will the new port area be updated?
Merchant Ships is coming!
Q: Why y’all keep creating unnecessary things/updates you should be updating in-game economics and taskboard, you think cone is more important than taskboard/economics?
We update economics multiple times a week. Key Metric we’re looking at is net-spend across users. There are certain users in the game with an earn mindset. And there’s bots. Bots and those with earn mindset look kinda similar. A very small percentage of users might be bots or those with the earn mindset are earning all the $PIXEL. 2% was earning all of the $PIXEL up until recently. Now we’re giving out more $PIXEL to those who aren’t purely extracting inside the game. We’re looking at net-spend. If you wanna earn more $PIXEL, that’s one of the things to look at. There’s different types of users who provide different value. If the game is made up of only grinders who extract, then it wont be good for the game
Q: I would like to ask, how social scraping will work for a creator like me that do mainly infographics?
That’s helpful. We’re so happy to give people earnings who help share the word of Pixels. We just posted yesterday that we got a Twitter scraper live. What we’re doing is running a scraper on all activity on X/Twitter that mentions Pixels. Keywords: $PIXEL, tag pixels online, pixel token, etc we’re tracking a mindshare score so if you’re able to get reputable retweets or impressions, you’ll start to get $PIXEL rewards pretty soon. That’s a good example of a type of user that is helpful to the ecosystem. Being a good player (nice, kind, showing up to events, etc) are other types of users we want to earn. This is tech we’re gonna be sharing with other people because a lot of other games align with our incentives.
We don’t hate earners, the game is P2E. But we have to think about other parts of our player-base too. There’s also interesting routes for other revenue streams too. Say we give this tech to another game, they spend a bit of their token, we can give that back to our stakers. The tech is important.
Q: Grinders should not get all pixels, their advantage should be the ability of farming high level items and profit selling it.
This is an in-game economics thing. Right now our whole team thinks the current Task Board is not the best one. We agree that newer players need to see T3/T4 items in their TB. But we also have to think about the new-player experience.
If you make the gameplay work really well for the end-game users but not helpful for new users, the game wont grow. If you make it too friendly for new users, it’ll get abused. We made some progress on T3/T4 stuff but we have to balance it with the new user experience.
Q: Luke, the TB is broken. It’s issuing pixels to low lvls more than higher levels, the pet care is still main source… T4 resources are missing from it.. Don’t leave it to rot. We need fix yesterday.
A fix should be coming. Pet care is broken, we talked about this earlier. An update should go out today.
Q: You are living in a parallel universe,just look at the chat here. How can you say tb is better?
All of the rewards cant go to grinders. If you’re a grinder who is playing Pixels every single day and selling it every single time, then you have to understand that we can’t just give all $PIXEL to those users. 1-2% of users taking 50% of the rewards is not good. We’re trying to share that out. We’ve been able to boost the earnings of some of our more casual players. But we have to build something sustainable. We want coordination, not selfishness.
Ask not what your token can do for you, but what you can do for your token
Q: Wen salt on TB?
I’ll bring up the salt again.
Q: We can increase RORS by giving us more things to spend on. I’ll give all my pixels back if I have good things to spend on! Add more bookmarks, backpack
There’s still work we need to do here. Team is talking a lot about this stuff too. We have certain revenue goals we wanna hit this year, and for that, we have to improve where players can spend and making it fun too. Fun has to be behind all of this. It’s not fun if we’re not progressing core loops and if none of it works. But we agree.
Q: Countries export goods for revenue. Put in-game items on chain as our exports
Pets being on-chain is super helpful. Our team is looking at this, and understand that this is super important to do sooner rather than later.
Q: Vip has been nerfed, no longer 1 pct fee, sauna nerfed, will this get a rework. give some extra or will change price?
Do expect a VIP rework. Right now team doesn’t think it feels as worth it as it could be, and we need to make sure it feels worth it.
Q: Can’t you make merchant ships more for T3 and T4 burning?
Yeah that’s what Merchant ships will focus on a lot.
Q: What’s the minimum number of pets a single player needs to own for the full experience in the upcoming pet app game - for fun/for earnings?
The on-chain pets will be the premium pets inside the game, but you wont need one to play. We want a free-to-play experience that is accessible and casual to those who know nothing about Web3 games. This aligns with our target audience in Pixels now. We want to target Web2 users. So first version wont have any Web3 earnings. It’ll use Pixels Login, but we can give a $PIXEL bonus for downloading or using the app. We wanna go #1 on the app store.
LFG VIP GIVEAWAY <3
That was fast LFG