We’re trying to build real things at Pixels. We believe that good will win out in the long-run. The goal is to solve P2E, and come up with a way to acquire new users that is more beneficial to you guys. If I was going out to build a Web2 game, would be spending 2-3 million, and 10 million to run ads. We’d be trying to extract as much money out of users as possible, and giving it to advertisers. Our goal is to get to sustainable economics. At the end of the day, we need to have net spend.
This is way cooler than what works in Web2 right now. Everyone will not be able to earn, but we do love P2E. There are a certain set of users that are valuable. In games, there are certain classifications of users. F2P minnows, normal users and whales - and a lot of F2P mindset is how do you get minnows to spend. Retaining minnows or users who aren’t spending as much led to way more monetization inside the game. If there’s areas where we can make the game 20% more successful than the Web2 counterpart, it’d be ideal.
We can start to funnel back more rewards if RORS is over 1. Reward attribution is the core tech here. Core strategy is attacked from 2 angles - make the game more fun, and all the other stuff around smart taskboard. The road map over the next 3-4 months is pretty exciting.
Chapter 3: was finalized on what it’ll look like. We’re going to be moving forward on contestable lands. There’s gonna be new in-game mechanics that you have to discover. These lands that are contestable will be seasonal. They’ll only be alive for a couple of months and will be where the most rare resources will be found. But that’ll be the end-game.
Chapter 2.5: Pixels Game Economy is not perfect but it’s a lot better than it was 1-2 months ago. Some of the taskboard features released but came with some bugs (like the petcare bug). And a lot more people were happy with the taskboard. The gameplan is to make it smarter. V3 of taskboard will work so differently. The current TB is so much harder to balance and V3 will be a huge improvement. Right now, the TB feels better to a lot of players because we were able to cut out a lot of bot earnings in the past couple weeks. One interesting behaviour we saw in F2P is without guardrails, 2% of users will take 50-80% of earnings. We want to reward more people who like what we’re doing, are helpful to the game, and make it clearer what being helpful to the game means.
Expected: Speed Ups and Merchant Boats should come out (conservatively) mid-late March. We’re trying to get better at our release cycle. Merchant Boats is going to be at the docks and it’ll have really large orders you’ll have to fill. They might be very difficult to fill. They’ll only be available for a short time, and the mechanics will be tied to the speed ups. The speed ups will be a cut-the-line mechanic. One thing you might see is that lands are very busy and you can’t use anything, so you’ll use the speed up currency to instantly start an industry.
Right now a lot of Land owners are closing their land. This is a problem. LOs think we’re ignoring this issue, but we’re seeing it. We want to make it so that if new users are coming and playing the game, they can find a spot to play the game. There needs to be a balance and incentive so the speed up currency and kickback request for LOs should help with that
We want to start to prioritize the long-term plan, even if that means short-term pain. So after Merchant ships, we’re working on a few new features. Badges and Achievements will be a fun one. We’re also redoing our LB events, with VIP tiering. Working on a salvaging mechanic. And a lot of monetization features. Pixels doesn’t have enough sinks, but we do have more in-game spend than most other games. We’re gonna add wheel spins, loot boxes, etc for fun.
Spore Sports overall, I’m glad we did it, but also glad it’s over. We’ll address questions on that.
In addition to all the Ch3 stuff, we’re looking at in-game automation. We’re trying to think of how it’s going to be done. We want automatic tree choppers or sprinklers, but we have to figure out how that looks. A lot of other farm games don’t make you grind the way Pixels makes you grind. How do you use automation on single-use industries on NFT Lands. Do we make them multi-use? Do only NFT Owners use automation? It’s all tricky.
Pets App: We’re probably going to gate access to the Pets App in the beginning. And do a full release within 2-3 months.
Pixel Dungeons just launched memberships to build out a better reward system. Go check it out. It’s kinda like VIP. It’d be cool to add a VIP pass across the ecosystem. We have more games joining the ecosystem soon. There might be a surprise if you get one of their memberships too. Not gonna leak the alpha.
Q&A Portion:Q: When pixel content creator approval?
A: Think it takes a week
Q: How are you reacting games might pop up and try to compete with pixels. Thinking a lot of players are P2E Hopper.
A: The reward-targeting tech that we’re building out is pretty good. There’s a lot more we’re going to be doing, and this is a huge competitive advantage. Our goal is to target the best users. We’re also building on tools that we can give out to other teams. You’ll see some cool partnership systems soon. When you think about our long-term, people talk about how we’ll ever be profitable if the only revenue you’re making is the $PIXEL token. Our goal is actually to build tools to help other teams deal with challenges we had. And we’d charge FIAT or other tokens for those tools.
Q: Sir, please change the taskboard
A: A lot of work we’ll be doing is with all the systems we have in place for the taskboard. We’ve only done about 1/10th of it. We’re trying to find a lot of reasons for why people should be getting $PIXEL. We know a lot of info about our users at this point, and there’s a lot of different reasons people should be getting $PIXEL. Internally, we’re trying to get more reasons: Positive players in the community (being toxic and being passionate and giving feedback is different, but if you’re just toxic, are you actually helping the game), guild participation, and looking at other KPIs for good behaviour.
Q: Can you try to use the captcha like the one in Sunflower?
A: I can promise you that our captcha is much more significant. It’s done secretly and they’re completely ineffective. It’s a barrier, but easy to bypass.
Q: I hope you introduce weekly mini-games that reward players with pixels, coins and UGC, while also granting reputation points. This might help keep players more engaged in the game.
A: We have a full-blown live-ops team. We like doing holiday-themed events, and there’s live ops events coming up (that’s not holiday-themed). The goal is to do repeatable ones. It’s not what you’re asking for but events outside of the core gameplay loop will happen more often. We should be spending more time on end-game gameplay rather than things like the holiday event. So we added on more people who can do things way better without much work
Q: How about the cheating issue in Spore Sports? Any actions for that?
A: It does look like some people were using autoclickers in SS. I don’t think that’s surprising to anyone. On the backend, we throttled the amount of clicks you could do on the backend, which some of you may have noticed. Maybe Autoclickers were more common than some of you will admit. The thought behind SS was successful, but the team didn’t have as much experience as we would’ve needed for a season-long competitive game. We’ve learnt a lot doing this and we’ve learnt what you guys like. If we re-run SS, it’ll look a lot different. We’re thinking with these new end-game features, economics will matter. Ability to win should not be based on how quick you can click. But we want to make sure that this event is fair, so we’re taking these reports seriously. If one person in the guild cheated, should the entire guild be punished? What if you guys were a good guild, and you had one bad player. A lot of this conversation took place yesterday and we pride ourselves on being farmer friendly and welcoming, and a lot of lines were crossed yesterday. A lot of bullying happened. Use the systems in place. We can have a conversation about it, but we’re here to build a safe community. Let us handle the end result, but there’s no reason to publicly bully anyone. We want to show people that the Pixels players and community-base is wholesome. We’re taking this seriously. We’re not asking you to defend cheaters. Having fair gameplay is our job. What we don’t like is the bullying. Take it out on us. Don’t take it out on other people.
Q: Botters its your time to shine gib automation
A: What’s interesting is actually Pixels-sponsored automation is to decrease the need to actually need a bot or autoclicker to play the game. Why are we making you spend so much time waiting for stuff instead of just implementing it into the system so it’s positive for the ecosystem
Q: Are you worried about DAU decreasing? Bots still around even in pixel dungeon? when more pixel utility QoL like additional bookmark, minting pet using pixel token in-game? staking?
A: Not concerned about DAU decreasing. If we’re churning real users, then we have a problem. If we hit more tokens spent than given out, we’re doing something great. I don’t care if they go to other games or leave. We want to keep our loyal, strong players. We have enough DAU to run large-scale testing on rewards. But we want quality DAU. And we have some more QoL improvements coming. This is two-fold. We have to stop giving rewards to players who aren’t beneficial to the community. And you’ll be more inclined to spend if there’s more compelling reasons to play the game. Pets App is pretty close.
Q: Please explain to me like I’m 7, how staking reward will be computed is there is no apr? TIA
A: There’s no guaranteed APR. Staking, might need to KYC gate it, but just note that. (particularly US or UK, this is due to the country’s legislations). There’s a lot of revenue spent in Pixels over the last year. Imagine if it went back to stakers. You can build predictability based on history. It’s your risk if you’re staking.
PIXEL BEST GAME
Thanks