There’s a lot of high-level stuff we’re working on right now. Chapter 3 is trending up, and we’ll keep tuning the core loop and economy. If it holds, we’ll start scaling soon in ways that connect with Chubkins and a new app that we have in development. The goal is to grow beyond Web3, reach a broader audience, grow a paid user base, and build a solid, sustainable business.
Our thesis has shifted slightly. To grow crypto gaming, we need to reach traditional gaming audiences. With new apps in development, we’re testing how to market Pixels concepts to that audience, learn what resonates, make it digestible, and generate revenue. That means running experiments like we started with Chubkins and other targeted tests. The new app we’re building, separate from Chubkins, will serve as a rewards hub across our games. Pixels will not move there fully, but some Pixels rewards will be available in the app. We’ll share more in the next AMAs.
🐦🔥 Ember Unleashed with Fableborne
Tyler from Fableborne stopped by today’s AMA to share two big things: a brand-new Pixels x Fableborne quest and the long-awaited Fableborne Season 4. Seasons have breaks where the game closes between launches and the most recent pause lasted a full year, so this one has been a long time coming.
The quest is titled Ember Unleashed and it will uncover a brand-new Fableborne hero and Pixels outfit that you will be rewarded with at the end of the 3-day quest. The grand reveal of the new hero will be via Pixels, so be sure to go play now!
How to Play:
🗺️ Find Glint by the raft left of Guild Hall and travel to the Mountains
⏰ Complete the daily steps for 3 days
🎁 Finish to claim your outfit and witness Fableborne’s newest hero
Huge thanks to Tyler and the Fableborne team for letting Pixels host the reveal!
Find everything you need to know about Ember Unleashed here 🔗
Time to highlight some creators!
Huge shoutout to Billa for putting together an in-depth thread on Chapter 3. It covers everything from Union breakdowns to Yieldstones, Offerings, and more. Thanks, Billa, for a super helpful guide for anyone diving into the update!
Chae took on the challenge of earning 1,000 $PIXEL as a free-to-play player and shared a detailed breakdown of the entire journey. It’s a fun, insightful guide full of tips and takeaways!
Another shoutout to ChickenPet for highlighting a huge milestone for Pixels, which shows that over $200 million $PIXEL has been staked to date!
Pixels on Pawn Stars!
Something wild just happened! Jihoz from Axie Infinity and Ronin joined a podcast with the stars of Pawn Stars, and Cloudwhite went on the show to try pawning a bunch of different Ronin items, including a Pixels NFT Space Land!
Check out the podcast episode with Jihoz 🎙️
Go watch the first clip we’ve released so far! 📺
Vote for Pixels and stream the ceremony live! 🏆
Pixels is nominated for Best Casual Game, Best Browser Game, and Best Multiplayer Game at the 2025 GAME3 Awards! Voting ends in less than a week, so make sure to head to the link below and cast your vote while there’s still time 🗳️
Another easy way to find the link is by clicking on the “Vote for Pixels” sign in the middle of Terra Villa. Sleepagotchi is also nominated so be sure to show them some love too.
🎥 The awards will stream live on Friday, November 21 at 11:30 am UTC. Look out for next Monday’s announcement, where we will share the link so you can tune in and cheer for Pixels!
Vote for us here ✅
Check out our X post with the official announcement here 📣
Neon Zone Live in Manila! 🇵🇭
We’re hosting an exciting live Neon Zone event in Manila on Wednesday, November 19th!
Expect tons of Pixels fun including a giant giraffe, Berry Blast you can actually drink, Stuff Stubs, and ZoneZ Tokens galore with traditional arcade games, along with playable Higher or Lower and Coin Flipper.
Don’t miss out on the fun, register here and join the party! 🎉
Next week’s AMA (November 19th)
We’ll be in Manila for the next AMA, so the format and timing will shift a bit. The next session might be next Saturday, November 22nd instead of our usual day and the next couple of weeks may feel a little different, but they’ll be very fun!
Questions from the AMA
I saw a $vPIXEL offer in the Pixels dashboard
We started rolling out $vPIXEL offers to some users and it’s fully integrated into the game. If you spend any Pixel in the game, you’ll have your $vPIXEL balance and your normal $PIXEL balance. Your $vPIXEL balance will be taken first and if you want, you can withdraw and stake it on chain. It works the same way as normal $PIXEL. $vPIXEL is promising because we can give out a lot more of it and it unlocks some potentially interesting rewards, so we might experiment a little more with it in the short term.
We need text versions of the AMA
You can see the AMA recaps weekly in the Pixels Post.
I didn’t get any offers, I thought you abandoned it
We’ve been building the offer system on the backend, shipping offers to small subsets of users and will be sending them more broadly soon.
How often do you receive $PIXEL from staking? I haven’t touched mine and I assume they are still staked?
There are 4 games you can stake against and all of them you can receive rewards. They’re still staked, but we recommend you go in, get your rewards, and restake your rewards so you’re earning even more.
What happened to Neon Zone? Please change the Mines and HL leaderboards, the ranked games’ rewards were very good
The leaderboards are dynamic now. The prize pools grow based on how much players spend in each game. For example, the Higher Lower prize pool scales with Higher Lower spending. There’s a max reward that’s bigger than ever before, so if players show up and play, the rewards can climb higher than any past event.
I see an offer tab in Chubkins too
The way you’ll earn in Chubkins is only through offers. There are offers to give users that make sense, like “Raise this pet with someone else” or “Invite 5 friends”. That’s the kind of stuff to expect in early versions, along with other mechanics around collections and sets. For example, if you complete a rare set, we’ll have an offer as a reward.
Why aren’t in-game staking rewards being given out anymore? Thanks
There’s a bit of a manual process behind it, but we’ll check on them. There are certain criteria we need to hit in order to give out these distributions, but we’ll try to move toward making that a tight schedule soon.
I would gladly spend $PIXEL if there were constant offers, but there are no offers.
That will be a priority in the next month or two. The team is working on it and that velocity will start to increase.
Will there be a new offer that will reward reputation or $PIXEL tokens?
These things are rewarded in the offer system right now. It’s a little bit different than before and the goal is to give rewards to people who actually help grow the ecosystem, which could be a few different things: playing every day, getting DAU, actually spending, having high reputation, and using the token more. We want to reward the people who are the most loyal to the game.
Can you put three offers and we select one to complete?
Part of what the offer system will do is track offer completion. In the future, you might get a new offer that might seem too hard to do, but that could just be us testing the system. That could be a good outcome: to give a bunch of different options. Maybe you would complete them all, or maybe some are stretches and some are achievable.
The last offers were buy 4m coins and get back 18-20 $vPIXEL
You can use some offers like a cash back offer, but it’s not every type of offer. Not every offer will be spending to get something back. For those, you can view it as a discount or sale and we are experimenting with coin pricing through offers.
Can you add something exciting to the Merchant Ships store?
There won’t be a significant update in the store yet but there’s a big update in the works now that is animalcare related, so watch out for that.
Bountyfall requires tweaking
We have been doing short-term tweaks after every session and then there will be big tweaks to make the gameplay feel better. One of the core issues is making the unions more competitive and the team is already thinking about solutions. If you have any feedback then let us know!
What do you think about making joining unions automatic before every war, like players get auto-assigned to a union, this way it will be balanced
We’re open to ideas and we have some ideas on what we think will work, but there are mechanics to auto-balance unions. Something is interesting, though, about having loyalty to a Union so that’s the only reason we might not do that.
I have a great idea, how do I submit an idea?
You can share ideas on the feedback page on our site.
How do we get Chapter 3 notifications?
There’s a Hearth Events channel directly under the general channel. You just click that and turn on your notifications for that specific channel.
How many pets are left in Neon Zone?
There are 3 left and they will be released 1 per day.
Imagine if Merchant Ships takes us to foreign lands like Forgotten Runiverse and we trade Pixels items for Runiverse items
We have gone through a lot of iterations on where the game should go and one of the initial specs was something like this. It’s better to do smaller features and test the econ first. Short run, probably not in the cards but for Chapter 4 or 5 we’ll start to think about that.