We’ll go over some updates, our long-term thinking and a general conversation.
New update brings changes to the way soil/harvesting works, and gave grace for players who deposited $PIXEL and want to withdraw.
There are two things we’re focused on at Pixels right now. We’re focused on building Chapter 3 and what that looks like. There were two options: piecemealing it out. or taking our time to get things right with it. And the latter is the way we went with. High level, we’re thinking PVP competitive lands. So there will be gameplay with getting to the land, controlling the land etc. But we also need to make it work with Web3 gaming. So the PVP we’re thinking will be economic PVP. What we don’t want to do is make it feel RNG. We don’t want the competitive land gameplay oriented around a chance to get.
There’s a spectrum of games. What we do inside Web3 games is not unique to Web3. But Web3 adds layers that make it Web3. We do not want to build a casino game. It’s not F2P gaming, it’s not casino gaming, so it has to be somewhere in the middle where there’s money component - and it’s silly to think someone would play a Web3 game the way they would a Web2 game. People spend money in Web2 games but with different expectations. They do a different math when it comes to ROI, etc. So it’d be silly to assume that when you add real money into the game loop that people wont see it differently. Which is important. We want to make Chapter 3 feel like the risk-to-earn is in your hands. In an economic game loop, you’ll create your own models and take your own risks. A great example of an economic game is to trade futures on bitcoin.
Merchant Ships is an example of a game that’s quite RNG. We want Chapter 3 to be the opposite of that.
Staking is tied to the economics inside the game. That’s cool because now you’re incentivized to think about how the game monetizes. There’s a direct trade off if you try to earn inside the game, vs stake, and that’s the kind of feeling we’re trying to get with Chapter 3.
What are you building to make people spend pixels in game? As to why they will really spend?
We’re building out risk to earn mechanics in the game where if you feel like you could earn more, you’ll spend more. This is the best and most sustainable way to do it. There’s a spectrum of players that’ll be needed for this - some participating in early economy, some in the P2E mechanics, and some in the end-game risk-to-earn mechanics.
There’s somewhat skill in Merchant Ships… pick the right contracts to fill, and just be very patient
There’s some things right about MS, but it’s not what we want for Chapter 3. We don’t wanna reskin an RNG mechanic.
Other things we’re working on is improving gameplay week by week. We want to keep pushing out things every week.
Q: We can pay for ease of play upgrades. People will spend $PIXEL if it means they will have easier life, like auto sorting inventory
Yeah one of our teams is dedicated to just week on week updates, and these are the kind of updates they’ll be looking for. But we also cant complete everything here, before end-game is out because
Q: When higher exp for forestry? Lvling is not worth it!
You will start to see more recipes and things like that come out as well. That team is focused on these things. We’re looking more at data to know what kinds of features we build within these months. So we’re looking at what kind of users are we losing, and why are we losing - so feedback, data behind who’s leaving, and why they might be leaving. When it comes to forestry, we’re likely rethinking some stuff around industry limits, specks, and forestry would be included if we were to rework those areas.
Q: Any stats of number of active players? Dappradar is showing -95% for the last year. Prove us this data is wrong!
A: Yes we’re down from our all-time-peak. But a lot of that peak were bots and sybil farmers. We have about 50k DAU right now and here’s why this is happening and why this isn’t a bad thing. Our thought process is no one cared about our DAU. We’re still top 10 but the market didn’t care when our DAU was highest. Market didn’t care and that’s something important to note. So we want to focus on our quality users, rebuild with a high quality audience. We noticed a much much larger amount of our users are high quality users. Now how do we build out a higher quality userbase. We’re smarter than a year ago, and sure there’s a few things we need to tweak, but it’s really important to grow with a userbase who is aligned in the long term and care about gameplay.
People keep asking when we’re going to decrease the farmer fee, but it’s not going to decrease. 60-70% of withdrawals have decreased, and this is healthy for the ecosystem. So DAU going down is painful in the short-term but we can protect people who care about the game for the long-run too
Q: When social features implementation? We need some collaboration in game among players to make the game teamwork oriented (not single player only)
We have been building out some more mini-games type things - some of the tech has been built out but the art hasn’t been done. It’s definitely in the works. There will be more content for you guys to do immediately.
Q: Luke mindset: withdraw pixels to buy cheaper coins to sustain TB = you don’t love the game
What I will say is if you’re staking $PIXEL, you probably shouldn’t like when people withdraw $PIXEL to spend outside of the game. The economy doesn’t capture OTC sales. Purchasing coins in-game captures it.
Q: So no worth it… quick silver to expensive to waste it for planting
Quicksilver might be a bit mispriced. We’ll start to give out QS more for different things. You might see it priced differently, want to see it be more accessible than it is right now.
Q: You said ‘pixel chain’ past days, are you really launching particular chain?
So my opinoin on chains have changed. Things like chain link and layer zero have gotten a lot better, and I don’t think it makes sense for Pixels to launch its own chain. In 2024, Pixels did 24M in chains, Polygon did 9M. Apps make a lot more revenue than chains do. Apps should be available in more chains. Pixel Dungeons will add multi-chain capabilities, and something we’ll start to do too is working with other games that live on other chains. We can have multi-chain support and still have Ronin be our home.
Q: Wen ads on lands? Some months ago we had to fill out that form but no response until today
I am still bullish on ads. There are certain users who might earn tokens inside the game but never spend. That’s fine if we have ads supporting that. Earnings might be able to come from ads. We talk about RORS over 1. Some get it, some don’t. Some people think if we get RORS over 1, we’re extracting from the userbase. But first consider the alternative: In web2 gaming, you don’t get any rewards for playing. They take all of the revenue. And 2. think about how you build a sustainable ecosystem. If we have more rewards going out forever, then we cant live forever. Not everyone needs to be a net spender or that no one can earn, but you need multiple ways to make this sustainable and ads might be a good way to do that. In F2P gaming, 2% of users typically drive 80% of revenue. Whales in Web2 will pay for status, cosmetics, QoL improvements - that probably applies in Web3 but there’s risk to earn models inside Web3. What’s difficult about ads is there’s not much inventory inside of Web3 gaming to fill ads. The only people who want to create ads are other Web3 games that don’t have the budget, or online casinos. And I don’t feel good about doing that.
Q: Any plans for merchant ships? Please don’t make us wait for chapter 3 to get something more rewarding than TB
MS will still be getting updates. MS updates need to be more around the content it provides. We know the rewards are not very compelling in the long run. And with TB, we don’t like the TB either for a bunch of reasons. It’s hard to target earnings.
Q:When will we have a balance TB. Level 300 have better rewards than level 600. It doesn’t make sense.
There’s a paradox with TB. CPP might increase at higher levels, but you have to remember you earn more coins at higher levels too. The CPP is not the best metric you guys use. But we do need to do some balancing. The TB makes it more difficult than we’d like to target earnings. I warn people before we’re going to grow everytime before we do it. I start to expect another really big growth push from Pixels. There will be a lot more targeted rewards, and give more reason for players to level up and play the game a bit more. There will be a new dashboard where you can see a bunch of rewards you can get every single day. You might see a $PIXEL reward to do small things like download the Pets App, making your first tweet about Pixels, login 7-days, refer friends, etc.
Q: Wen pet apps
Early access will probably be for like a month or two. We only want to open it up to current pet/land owners. We just want feedback in the first stages. The important part is if the game’s good. We’re trying to push to new audiences. There were a lot more Web3 games a year ago than today. So Games and Web3 gaming need to get better and appeal to Web2 gamers. Real money economy stuff needs to appeal more to Web3. The earnings in the pets app will be more aligned with the social side of things. But the bonus should be for fun, or nice to have. Not the same type of earnings as core Pixels. We just want to onboard a lot of Web2 players
Q: Stuff like parties on lands should be incentivized too, those are always the best thing about the game. As evidenced on screen right now.
When we start to hit 1k users, servers shut down. But they’re a nice thing to incentivize on
Q: Must reduce gas fee of withdrawal at least 5,10 pixels. It’s really high, i want to be able to withdraw my pixels but I am waiting for your reduction..
A: We’re not reducing it, but you can raise your reputation to decrease your own fees.
Q: Wen vpixel?
I think early June is a realistic time frame. We’re working with the Limit break team right now. We’re going to be the first implementation of app tokens in the wild. LB team has been very generous with working with us. How you actually implement the tokens is not very straightforward but it’s so powerful.
Q: Put some weathers that affect crop and trees and industries lukeee
I do like entropy systems for Chapter 3. It makes sense for a Ch3 mechanic. Give some feedback on this: I personally would really like an entropy system that isn’t random. But I feel like the game gets more interesting. Imagine if there was a drought and all your popberries died. You’d have to make interesting decisions around what to do when you’re predicting the weather. How do we make systems like that where there’s skill involved with entropy systems.
Q: One interesting problem with in-game mechanics for digital real-currency entropy is that a common one are casino mechanics which as unusual web3 implications
Yea so if its very random, it’s more casino-like. So we’re really trying to take time to get the skill part right, and make it much less RNG. A weather system based on the price of bitcoin would be interesting. That would add entropy that would be semi-predictable. If you think bitcoin is going to go up, long popberries. That might not be the right direction, but that’s what we’re thinking basically.
Q: Incentivized ads as content vertical have been performing well on ad gaming networks lately
Yeah there’s something there. I’m sure a lot of you would watch an ad for more energy, reputation, etc inside the game. But we need to build out inventory. I always thought there would be someone in Web3 would build out ad inventory. But I don’t want to put ads in for casinos. We need high quality ad inventory. If anyone has connections here with the right partners, we’re interested here.
Q: How in the world were people able to complete the AIVeronica quest in under 30 seconds? I had to wait longer than that for a reply on some chats lol
Yeah I think the AI takes longer to reply if it’s stressed. We’ll be looking into it to make sure there are no cheaters on the leaderboards.
I like this risk to earn mechanics and make it hard to bot and fun to play LFG!