Like doing IRL Events. Keeping travelling down this year but will be at GDC and YGG Play Summit every year. Someone build a massive sauna in Manila! That’d be fun.
Luke Franks vlog displayed on stream
Jehu: PH doesn’t have a big sauna, we have a big beach
→ Maybe we should do a Shorelime event 👀
If anyone is ever interested in doing an IRL event, and you have a good plan, we’d consider sponsoring it! IRL hangouts, provide a budget, tell us the avenue, the event and we’d consider it. [Contact Support not Luke’s DMs]
There’s something huge that’s about to be announced that we’ve tried to avoid leaking for so long.
Our staking system is going to be kinda new. It’s going to be one of those things people see and copy cuz it makes sense.
→ Token: Not so bullish of a single game token. Single game tokens aren’t performing super well and are kinda hard to launch right now. Any WEB3 game still in the early phases needs to have a bigger vision. The bigger we make all of this, the more core Pixels benefits too.
→ We’re trying to build the biggest Web3 game company there ever is, and we want Pixels to be the flagship game, and there’s important to make every game we release be as good as possible, fun as possible.
→ We’re going to let you stake in the Pixels ecosystem. You can stake to many games. Pixel Dungeons, or Pixels are the first two. But more games are coming. We want to open this up to everyone in the long-run. When you stake to a game, we’re not taking tokens away from the games for user acquisition. What a lot of companies do, they set aside a % of their tokens for staking. If we did that, it’d be less rewards for our users. And that’s why we didn’t like staking.
→ The cool thing is we generated a lot of revenue, and we still do, so we’d like to give that to stakers as rewards.
Pixels is trying to build something bigger by solving P2E. Being realistic, I think we’re at 30-40%. GDC has gotten us to connect with a lot of Web3 builders. Everyone at Web3 gaming is facing the exact same problems. Even Web2 games struggle with similar problem sets.
ERC-721C is an NFT where you can enforce royalties. ERC-20C is a token where you can enforce a fee. We can start to bring more people into the ecosystem, and bring revenue streams of these other tokens in the long-run too, then maybe give them back to stakers or do a buy-back-and-burn system. Basically, the more games we get to partner with us, the better Core Pixels get because we get more data to serve our gamers.
I think you’ll see that we are in a better spot. We’re not perfect. Chapter 2 did not put us in the best spot. Team is finally getting into a better spot where we can do updates quickly. For example, task board update went out yesterday. And we’re getting mixed signals. But now we can quickly update that. We’re trying to stay in that F it Ship It Mentality.
We’re a live Web3 game, we can’t take 4 years to build
Q: I still want more of the core game. I wanted to see games within the game like in PIXMAS. but that’s just me. Don’t liek other games without the Pixels signature design.
A: Yeah and we want to keep building core Pixels!
Q: Pixels have been dead for a long time. They are just trying to show that everything is fine.
A: Pixels still has the most revenue, the most DAU out of every live Web3 game right now. It’s not a dead game. There’s so much cool stuff we’re doing. It’s not a dead game. It’s interesting because we’re getting the most interest out of the important people. There’s many different types of people in Web3. We’re attracting a specific type of audience very important for token ecosystem right now. Are we on the right track? This is why we need to make sure we’re releasing new things, and also make sure we’re getting other games too.
We want to bring more players into the Pixels ecosystem. We need the core game better, need to make it scale into Web2. We’ve onboarded a lot of players into Web3 gaming. We want partner projects to also bring in new users and contribute to the ecosystem. We want to expand the audience, and that’s kinda the end-goal there. Some exciting new features - I think Merchant Ship is coming April 1. That’s the expected release date. Don’t take that to heart. It might be a meme. Staking early April. Pets app early access mid-April.
The pets app, the approach on this one - it will be quite early. There are still 3 months of features before we can do a full release. So probably June before we can get it out to mass-market. We need to get feedback first from you guys to make sure the game is playing well.
Alok kumar: No matter what the stage the game is in, the dedication of you both guys for pixel is crazy. people should learn how they are doing sustainable development around the market
That is important. What’s cool about where we’re at, is we’re well funded so we’ll survive the bear market. That’s the most important thing about any company. We’ll get through the bear market. The sustainability is also the biggest thing. There’s no sustainable company right now. Some other teams are doing some things that we could learn from, and we want to be able to share as well. Core Pixels has some work to get up to the speed of Web2 games. End game for Core Pixels is we want to make the game great. If other games start to use the $PIXEL token and they’re doing better than Core Pixels, then that’s good for the ecosystem. It’s more token utility, if you stake $PIXEL, you also get to participate in how well they’re doing, and you get to make those bets and decide the future of the ecosystem too. So if you’re a huge Pixel Dungeons fan, you can stake to that instead of the core game. Of course we want the core game to have the most staked.
The Pixel system has a mission to make P2E work. We need players, we need data on how to get players to use tokens, and we cant make it work if we have no players, games or conviction. We want to reward players to be rewarded for helping us to get to our goal.
Q: Can you stop Pixel Dungeons wasting rewards to bot? Please check on them. We have bots in Pixels, now we added pixel dungeons
A: This is a core problem. Web2 and Web3 gaming have issues with bots. We have fingerprints of accounts. What you really need to do to stop bots is to kill their reward incentive. We want to predict what users will do with their tokens before we even give it to them.
If I wanted to grow a game, and wasn’t very smart about it, I’d buy a billboard in Nebraska cuz it’s easy to buy a billboard in the middle of nowhere. It’d cost me maybe $1000 for a couple of months. But it’s the cheapest possible ad I could get. If I was trying to get smarter about it, putting this billboard in the middle of Nebraska was not the brightest idea. Maybe I should put it in TImes Square. It might be more expensive, but more people will see it. P2E is similar. If you just give out incentives but not smart about it, you will just cost the ecosystem. So if you give it out to bots, that’s not very smart.
There’s some really shady stuff happening in Web2 right now because games are having a hard time retaining users right now. The advertisers who were willing in these ads see that these games are making more money. So when they see the game is making more money, they charge the game more money, which reduces the game’s margins. With the Web3 model, you get to see a transparent rake.
Q: I feel like the updates are finally going in the right direction, but it seems like they came too late
A: I still think Web3 is in the early phase. If we could’ve gotten it out earlier, we would have. The new team really needed to get up to speed and learn about the Core Pixels game. What’s interesting about Pixels is we were able to move fast enough to revamp the economy like 3 or 4 times. If we were building a Web2 game [and even some Web3 games took too long to get their game out] we would spend 4 years making a game, get it perfect, then release it.
Q: What are you trying to solve? p2e?
A: I like to view P2E rewards as a type of ad that’s better for the user. We could do the Web2 model and spend P2E rewards on advertisement. But instead, we’re building a new way to grow games using rewards. We don’t have to go through advertisers, we go through players to help us grow. We have to build something out similar to a Web2 model, but players get rewarded.
Q: Dont focus on metrics… the core “game” is not gaming. What is there to do except TB (earning) (broken again) or playing MP (earning coins you sell OTC). it is not fun.. only gacha remains
A: Task board’s been a good system in some ways, but we need to get out more systems like Merchant Ships. Also TB is not broken. It needs to be tweaked sure, because we started introducing more things, but it’s not “broken”. T3/T4 tasks only make sense to surface if you’re able to buy them. But yeah we need to tweak those things. We’re looking at energy, time to complete, but there are other things we need to look at now to tweak things.
Q: How serious are you taking care of cheaters now? Can you give stats on banned cheaters. just tell some numbers please.
A: We’ve banned like 2-3m accounts total. People think we want bots in the game cuz it boosts DAU, but bots ruin the economy. Bots are the worse at RORS. We can’t achieve positive RORS if we have bots. The easiest way to increase the number is to decrease bots and how much bots earn. DAU is not a good metric that is super helpful right now. If RORS is over 1, then that means we have a certain % of spending users, and that would be very helpful.
Q: ANY EXCITING ANNOUNCEMENT?
A: We want to share but we can’t yet..
Q: Heidi, you(?) said let’s get it to 80% and ship it.. How long do you foresee those 20% will take to fix? You know, asking because C2 updates omnishambles You can understand players are worried
A: Yes you’ll say that because you’ve been around a while, but it takes a few days to a few weeks depending on the complexity of the update. So this one should be pretty quick but it requires a little balancing so might take a week or two. I understand your perspective, but with this different team, they’re up-to-speed and onboard with things. I hope you’ve been seeing in the last several weeks, we’ve been getting out pushes we’ve needed to make.
Q: What impact has data science had on game improvements so far?
A: We’ve found a way to nerf bot earnings pretty well. 2% of users were taking 50% of rewards. There are some good users in that, but we started nerfing some very extractive users who weren’t contributing anything good to the ecosystem. What we hope you’ll start to see from us too is look at more ways to earn. What are the things we want to see so we can see the ecosystem grow? K-factor is something we’re looking at. If you have a K-Factor over 1, that’s a lightning in a bottle magic.
Q: What time does clover clash end?
A: It’s going to end on Saturday, but we’re going to add that hourglass to the game. You’ll have warning.
Q: Wen creator codes?
A: I thought it was a successful program. We’re going to have a meeting about it, then release it again in the next few weeks. It went well, so we’ll continue to do it, and we’ll probably expand it in the long-run. But eventually everyone should be able to get a code if they want. We’ll keep it locked down still for the next month or two, and we want everyone to be an ambassador for Pixels and get rewarded.
Q: Luke I love you so much, brother. If you look at the camera and smile and tell me everything will be okay, I’ll trust you. I won’t bother you anymore.
A: What I can say is I’ve been speaking to a lot of Web3 builders here at GDC, and the issue with Web3 games is a lot of teams gave a lot of lofty promises, and there were also a lot of scams. So I understand people are very hurt right now. The amount of good-intention people left in the space right now is pretty high. I’m so bullish on so many teams remaining still. Market is sometimes scary when there’s washouts. There’s a lot of Web3 games that are going to die in the next 6 months, and that’s very sad. But people who are going to make it through the bear market, they’re really good. Forgotten Runes is a good example. They have such a strong IP. They just got approved for consoles, and that’s something we should celebrate. The Kaidro team is also building some really cool stuff. A lot of these teams are so insanely passionate and have the right ideas. It’s a zigzag path to get there.
hmmmm
wen pixels billboard hunt