Q: When are you going back to PH?
Probably November.
Staking, AIVeronica Collab, Forgotten Runiverse Partnership, etc. On the back end, we’re focused on - this is the first week we haven’t had a live update going out. That’s not the norm, we’re still pushing some stuff. We’re releasing something that kinda feels like the carnival that’ll be running live and for a long time. And other small gameplay that should be coming out. We’re working on Chapter 3.
Chapter 3: tactically, we rushed to get CH2 out much quicker than it should have been, and we’re trying to get it right this time. The idea is to make sure we’re doing the right stuff. We don’t want gameplay that feels very random, or like you don’t have a say in how things go. Our end goal with Chapter 3 is to add compelling gameplay, and non-combat PVP. At the end game of Ch3, there will be some form of competition. There will be risk to earn without feeling like it’s random and out of your hands. But it’ll feel like the decisions you’re making is because of some kind of alpha. Game economy might be the matrix of decisions. So there can’t be too much RNG. Ideally, we want the end-game loop to be in this concept where it feels like decisions you make matter.
Staking: Expect more games to join the Pixels ecosystem quite good. Our approach is games are going to be curated in the first stages, and anyone who joins is ready to join. There’s a lot of games that want to join that aren’t quite ready. Pixel Dungeons is the most efficient partner in the ecosystem right now. We’re also talking to DAPPs that might be a really good fit. Another game wants to join quite soon. Then we’ll move into the Phase 2 quite soon (if you read the Whitepaper). We’re decentralizing the ecosystem into your hands. You get to vote with the $PIXEL earning. Expect more games into the Ecosystem soon. We want to bring in games that’ll bring net-new eyes as well. Ideal situation, that’s the stuff we’re looking at.
Leaderboard Beta Testing Rewards, I think it was well-received. AIVeronica ends tomorrow. Spring Fest - if you’re in the Pixels community, you know who PixelCatGuy and Luuu is. Huge integrated avatar giveaway with lots of fun interactions and such. Also the Pixels Creator Academy - help new creators come in, support new content, etc. If you’ve ever thought about becoming a content creator, our program is such an amazing start for beginners.
Q: Also activate some gameplay for guilds also
The way we’re thinking about it will need to involve guilds a lot more. Also we’re missing a lot of gameplay around guilds. Our staking system is a good analogy for what guilds could’ve been. We need to change the guilds system. The bonding curve mechanic may have not been the right mechanic. If we change it, we’ll make sure everyone’s good. The staking system we just released is inspiring a lot of gameplay mechanics. Imagine you could stake your $PIXEL to a guild, while still being staked to Core Pixels. I like the concept of guilds a lot and we need to add metagame on top of guilds. One aspect we were missing is like if you’re a player who didn’t want to grind, but still wanted to support a guild. There was a lot of burden on Guild Leaders in Spore Sports. Maybe if you had staked $PIXEL to a guild, the prize pool for that Guild increases. If you guys have ideas on how to make guilds work. Seen a lot of people ask for Spore Sports Season 3 which was surprising. Internally, I was saying we’d never do this again, but maybe we do bring it back as an in-between of S1 and S2. Imagine you just want to bet on a guild, that’d be interesting. Working with a prediction market on something like this would be cool
Q: Is there a way to monetize and maybe rent the tech you’ve built to others to give back to pixel?
Now you have more of a reason to care about how Pixels is doing in terms of monetization and general performance. This is another thing we’re working on that you don’t really see. There’s a whole backend of things that we’re building out that we want to offer to other teams that join the Pixels ecosystem. You want to see what happens when people get rewards, where they’re being spent, what do people do with their rewards. But there’s cool stuff we’re working on that’s tied in to the staking side of things. You can view staking as a third layer - we’re incentivizing games to give data so we can give out rewards better. The more games that join the ecosystem, the better data we have, and the smarter we can get with giving out rewards. It’s interesting, we just saw Maplestory release their game - And I think they had the most thought out tokenomics seen in a Web3 game right now. But they’re still having the same issues as everyone else in the ecosystem. They are distributing rewards in the wrong way.
You’re going to see a concept of an offer wall soon. We give a lot of rewards to the task board right now, but it’s not the best way to give out rewards in the long-run. My best solution here is eventually we want to move TB to be coin-only. So there will be a new dashboard with more concrete tasks that are more personalized than they are now. And ideally, it’ll work with every game we partner with. Hopefully we can get that going in realistically 2 months. Priorities internally - there are 2 or 3 right now. First is figuring out what Chapter 3 looks like. We want our pride and joy to be the best game in the ecosystem. Second is data science and getting better rewards to users, and building out a system that works for everyone
Q: Luke doesn’t care about rep
People keep asking qs about reputation - Rep is a system that a lot of other games want, and it’s more important now than it has been. Our system isn’t perfect, and when rep is taken from a user it feels very bad, so maybe we need a different strategy here. We need to get the best long-term plan here - High level, it’s a good system but it needs tweaks and refinement. The rep system is a good way to make sure we’re gating certain features to real users. Now there’s an economic incentive too where it affects your farmer fee. We want to make sure we have aligned incentives. We need to start doing growth loop again - we’re getting ready again. You’ve seen it. If you’ve been following Pixels for a long time, we tell you when we’re about to grow. We need to figure out how to make the Web3 experience better for users who know nothing about Web3. We also don’t offer an easy path to gain reputation. Right now, there’s an interesting Web3 game where every game is targeting the same userbase. There’s less Web3 gamers than there were 1 year ago. When alts perform stronger, so is crypto gaming, but we shouldn’t be dependent on markets. Market’s just not big enough right now to only go towards Web3 users. So we need to find ways to target Web2 users. So we need to build tools to get out of this Web3 bubble and target users outside the bubble. That’s the strategy with the Pets App. Earning is not the strategy for the Pets App. Early access for the game should be in like a month. With early access, we’re going to be intentional. We will bring in cohorts of 100 people every week. We’ll be looking at the data.
Q: I’m low on time atm to go back to content creation but want to learn deeper about social media. Is content creator program for me?
We have different tiers in the content creator program - As long as you meet the threshold, you can still be part of the program.
Q: Players asking about in-game reputation and pets are only focused on earning money from the game. Stop prioritizing irrelevant questions. Boost engagement, competition, and fairness in game!
Directionally, I don’t think you’re completely wrong, but these can be motivators to do some of the other stuff. The reality is when you add Web3 to a game, you cant avoid some of the side effects of it which is not necessarily a bad thing. Risk to earn is interesting to a lot of games. Consensus is some element of risk to earn makes sense. It doesn’t have to look like PVP combat. There’s a partner game coming with something quite soon with that. That’s where we’re moving in the long run too. Create a game that’s sustainable. Play-To-Earn: If everybody earned, the game would die. That’s not sustainable. Someone has to be spending inside the game and that’s why we talk about RORS. Some can earn, but not everyone can. So how do you make it so someone spends inside the game. Web2 has players spending inside the game etc. When you add Web3, it changes the way people play the game. Staking introduced interesting game theory - you now have the option to spend it in-game, and there’s a certain yield you get from that. So now there’s a trade off between spending and holding. So how do we make a system where spending still matters. There’s always going to be a crowd that is ROI, but there’s a lot of things to think about.
Q: Programmatic advertising would allow dsps to place in the game based on who your users are opposed to someone targeting web3 users
The ideal situation, is you go to your dashboard in Pixels and see rewards you can get from multiple systems in game. Maybe there’s a discount on Pickaxes, maybe a game will pay 10 $PIXEL for you to login today
Q: What happened to telegram game, did you abandon it?
I was interested in TG at first, there was a meta around it. Like the AI meta. Was popular in December/Jan, it gets overplayed. I was hesitant to move fwd with it but people liked it more than they thought. Cyberverse added an in-game maid. Idk if I love that framing, but it’s interesting. The AI Agent meta, people go too hard on it. TG is a good example - has a ton of users, and we wanted to see if that game would be effective. We did data analysis, and it probably wasn’t the right channel for us. It was an experiment where the TG game for us wasn’t that good. It wasn’t a huge investment. But it was a good experiment.
Q: BTC hits new ATH this time
It’s disconnected from the alt market. When alts start to go up, you’ll see people flow back into crypto gaming naturally. Long run this is normally good. When BTC goes up, alts follow. It is interesting. We need to figure out new ways to grow into Web2 audiences, avoid the trap of Web3 games being so market-driven, and figure out the end-game. There’s been so little iteration on game mechanics. It’s quite costly to make a Web3 game, I would love to take examples from other Web3 games but they’re shutting down instead of trying new stuff. That’s kind of the end-goal in what we’re thinking right now.
Q: Next Live Ops?
We’re shifting our strategy on Live Ops to focusing on forever features. Systems and stuff that’ll stay in the game. This leaderboard feature is a good example of a system that’ll stay in the game. Also Luke hinted at a building that is under construction, that is.. coming or heavily on the live ops team. There’s more things coming. That’s not to say we wont throw a Live Ops event, but that’s not our main strategy right now.
Could you please make a recap of Land Owners AMA?
I don't speak English and a recap would help a lot with the translation.