Q: When Ch3?
I think October. Don’t hold me to that but it’s coming along quite nicely. The functionality has been built out, so it’s just QA to make it pretty.
Q: End or beginning of October?
Maybe I don’t like saying these things so we don’t have 2-4 weeks. October seems realistic. We’re finishing up Art and Polish. We also want to make it easy to understand also. We want to make sure that a lot of people are understanding how to play it. The core functionality is done. Chapter 3 is going to feel more like a feature than something crazy or completely new. It’ll be a totally different type of gameplay. We don’t wanna overhype it. We did start working on it only 2 months ago. Chapter 2 and fixing it took a long time. We want to start shipping quicker, doing smaller bets, and learning quickly from a chapter. We like how its coming up and hope it goes well, hope you guys like it. Lots of what we’re focused on is polish, art etc. Also this is probably when we’re gonna switch up and focus on different types of earnings (like moving rewards from Taskboard). We’re not gonna do anything drastic on initial release, what we could do is gradually decrease earnings from taskboard to move them into the other systems. Chapter 3 will be more risk-to-earn. Ch3 is also an ongoing feature. Imagine your day-to-day is no longer only taskboard. If you’re earn-oriented, you’ll play the new feature a lot more.
This is one of the features I wanna roll out. The first version of Offers. Let’s talk about that, the intention and the future. Transparently, this is a new system we’re rolling out that’ll dish out earnings in this and other games. The tech behind it already works for any games in the Pixels ecosystem. We gave an SDK to every partner that they’re integrating. When you have multiple games using the Offer system, it becomes better cuz it has more games to learn from. Completely blunt and honest: I love P2E, we’re still dedicated to it. Some people say P2E is dead again but they’re wrong.
TikTok has popups to earn money to play a little mini games, and they’d pay me in shop credit if I invited a new user. So if anyone tells you P2E doesn’t work, they’re silly cuz some of the biggest Web2 companies are experimenting with P2E and offers.
We’re still building P2E and we still think we can make it work. If you’ve followed Pixels for a long time, you have seen that we’ve been trying to figure out the right people to give rewards to. We’re excited about all of this at Pixels cuz we put this stuff publicly. Go to our staking dashboard and you can see our RORS has been increasing a ton. We’ve gotten pretty close to 1. We just have to lift the revenue by 20% to be profitable. Even Pixel Dungeons is pretty close to 1 every day. Pixels as an ecosystem has 28M $PIXEL to give out every month. If our RORS is under 1, then we can only give out 28M max. If we can get it over 1, we can start scaling. If we give out 20M and get 30M back, next month, we can give out 30M and hopefully get 35 or 40M back. With rewarded offers, we’d be able to grow our userbase. We’re excited to get there - that’s the end goal. And if we can prove with our games, then other companies can use the same tech. Games you love can turn into P2E if we can prove this can work.
Soon, we’ll add the pets game to the staking page. Even if it doesn’t go live around the same time, it’s just to show that it’s a game joining the ecosystem. Also we might call this P2E tech (offers) something else… It’d be another line in the staking system too.
Just being transparent about how this all works… So we have an Offer Wall, but when you login, you might also see a popup. If you did get a popup and haven’t seen it, there’s a new dashboard you can go to called the offer wall. So it’ll be a list of tasks of available offers that you might see. For a given player, they will have different offers and rewards. Some players might not see any offers in their offer wall. As we start to make this system better and better, this is supposed to be a RORS optimizing engine. We’re only giving rewards to players who are using rewards in game or spending them. So over the next little bit, we’ll be experimenting with offers a lot. Not every single player will see rewards every day. Sometimes there will be variance because we’re A/B Testing. We’re being transparent because you guys are being test subjects, but we’ll look at things like clickthrough rates, how long it takes you to do an offer, etc.
In Web2 games, offers are typically just one thing - a discount. Like if a game knows you’re low health or something, it might show you an offer for a discount to revive or get potions. The discounts here is not what we’re focused on in the first stages. We’re thinking of this as our unique selling point when we’re building out anything. We can plug this into any game that uses the SDK. Like the Pet game will integrate this. It will experiment with real money rewards.
We worked on this system for about a year. The end goal here is a combination of this system and Chapter 3 will make the game sustainable. Month on Month there’s less daily active players, etc. We made that choice because there were a lot of $PIXEL emissions every month. Rewards were going out, being sold, and we weren’t doing the right thing with who the rewards were going to. So the three goals are: achieve sustainability, start to grow the user base, don’t hurt the token while we grow the user base and give out rewards.
No no almost all rake in online poker is generated at low-mid stakes cause of volume and higher rake in lower stakes
We can talk about poker economics. But when you think about user acquisition and economics, there’s a lot you can pull in. Casinos online have a few strategies you can go down - there’s whale hunting where you go after high stakes tables, low-mid, and social casinos. Social Casinos are even on app stores. High stakes generates the most revenue per player. It’s still tricky to acquire new whales which is a similar problem you see in a lot of crypto spaces right now. You’d be surprised how few users there are that spend over a certain amount. There’s a game on Ronin that is doing really well and goes after a more crypto native audience. They have good revenue numbers, and the revenue is driven by around 20 players. Sometimes you tap out on the number of higher spenders in an ecosystem. High stakes acquisition users is extremely expensive. So other models go after low-mid stakes. What Pixels is trying to do is we’re not going after high-stakes at all. We need to get more users.
Wen next UGC Fair?
We wont have another UGC Fair for like another year or so. I can’t say we don’t have enough to fill it up. but we wont do another for a long time. We’ll keep using UGC when we throw events though. There’s so many halloween UGC being submitted already.
Pixel dungeons care about RORS. They don’t listen to players and they don’t care if players enjoy the game. game became annoying
Okay so let’s dig into that a little bit. Imagine if there were no rewards at all in Pixel Dungeons, if they didn’t do things like missions, etc, they’d immediately have RORS over 1. If they wanted to, they could make the game take in 5-10% rake, use $PIXEL to buy pickaxes, they reserve 5% of that to grow the game, and 95% reward goes towards the reward pool. But they take in a bigger loss to make systems to grow the game more. It’s been tricky. But think about the math. If there’s RORS over 1, there are some players spending more than they’re earning. The issue is who’s spending. Should the people who are spending the most earn the most, or should the people who spend the most earn less? These are things to ask. Sometimes a really highly skilled player can take the entire reward from the prize pool. It’s fair, but it’s not the greatest experience either. One of the key things we’re starting to realize too is when you add rewards, it changes how the game is played. With the pets app, the earnings are not going to be tied to the core game either. We have to think about where are the right places to place rewards into the game. I don’t think a fun game, if the earnings are in the wrong spots, will work. Depending on where you add the rewards, it changes how the game is played drastically. The dungeons one is interesting - if you play with the expectation of always winning, then that would make it less fun.
Can you add stuff stubs to the offer wall?
That’s a great example of one. What I’ll say is there’s some sensitivity to this one - we’ll be careful with this. When we think about Ch3 and other parts of the game, there’s some areas where spend is more likely to happen. It does make sense to give out rewards to places where there’d be more ecosystem sinks.
Please separate the log out button from the choose word button
We’ll see about moving it down to the bottom of the screen for mobile users. Don’t think it’s a PC issue.
Fun = Max Earning no risk
Earning a ton without risking anything is very fun. That’s why Chapter 1 was so fun to a lot of people. There was a lot of inflation. Yeah it was fun but it wouldnt work in the long run. That’s not to say there can’t be earnings in the game that have no risk to users. There’s other things we can have you guys do that’ll help grow the game. Referrals are a good example but I feel like we can do something better. Imagine a world where we put all our earnings into referrals. There’d be a lot of people grinding to get referrals, there’d be a lot of abuse There’s something in the game we can get you to do to benefit the ecosystem too though.
You previously mentioned that vpixel is not ready for release for certain reasons. Are the USDC rewards at the same level of implementation?
Both of these things are ready to release right now. We could give out USDC rewards and we can give out vPIxel. The issue is inside of the game right now is it’s a one-way door. The offer wall might be able to give out just vPIxel. But the reason we haven’t done it so far is because if we roll it out, it’d be all or nothing. It seems risky to do that right now. But if we did do that, you’d still be able to get normal $PIXEL by staking vPixel so keep that in mind. USDC rewards: waiting for RORS to be over 1. When RORS is over 1, we can give out USDC rewards. If we gave out USDC now, we’d be burning money.
Would you consider allowing UGC/NFT sales for Pixels, taking a cut for the game to boost RORS?
Yes, it’s something that’s interesting but the reason we haven’t done it yet is because it makes a lot more sense when there’s more players. It would’ve made sense when we had peak DAU. The more effective thing was to do coin purchasing in-game. There are higher priority things to focus on first. How can we get 10x improvements on what we currently have. We need to find 10x improvements in different areas. When you think about incentives, the team is aligned on the token. The foundation can still make it so it’s foundation-owned tech so that revenue generated from the SDK/Offer wall can still be rewarded to Pixel Stakers. Revenue generated, foundation may decide to do buy-backs. The foundation is able to help support and fund technology. It’s a much better spot to be in than a foundation that has no revenue.
Can we exchange vPixel to $PIXEL?
No.
When is merchant ships update. Feel a mini leaderboard for Buoys earned per week would make it more competitive
It’s coming soon. 2-4 weeks.
Wen new mini-games in Neon Zone
2-4 weeks. Couple more games coming. Was in the DMs of some of our devs this morning for some themed mini-games. Dunno if we’ll be able to pull it off, but we’re working on things.
Move entirely PIXEL to vPIXEL! Send it!
I am a send it kinda person but I don’t think it’s the right call to do it yet. If we really didnt think we could grow Pixels further, and it was a lost cause, but still very optimistic. We might be able to roll it out slowly, but the one thing we wanted to test was see how much someone would value a vPixel compared to a $PIXEL.
When will you bring new players in the game?
Ch3, we wanna see how it goes. If we see metrics in a way we like to, then we’d make a mobile companion app. Then we’d do a bigger growth push there. Ch3, offer wall, etc, tweak earnings, get Pixels to RORS over 1, then we start scaling. If no, then we need to build better features.
Has Pixel Tech already shared to other ronin games? I saw a game that I will use AppToken
Fishing Frenzy is starting to use AppTokens, but not sharing our tech. But I think we’ll make the tech a platform.
I don’t understand vPixels, I don’t get the use care for vPixels that Pixels doesn’t fill
The use case is it’ll be as useful, but you cant sell it. It’ll filter out users who are immediately selling. And end-goal would be staking rewards are USDC.
So you are ditching Pixels in the future?
No we’re not ditching Pixels. Long-term at Pixels, what might even happen is $PIXEL might become stake-only. Not saying we’re doing this, but it could be stake-only and might not give it out anymore. You might be able to buy it from exchanges, and then you get USDC as staking rewards. It’s bullish if we can make that work in the long-run.
Thanks for recup.