We’re starting to get into an exciting time for Pixels. We keep slightly delaying new internal things because they’re ready but we want to make sure the user experience is really good. Since we’re in a bare market, we want to time the announcements right. We still have the firm belief that if you build something of value, crypto is a very interesting mechanism to help share the value you’ve created across an entire protocol and people participating in it. We’ve made games people have loved, and now we’re trying to figure out sustainable models.

During the AMA, Heidi hungout at the theater with the community and gave out Quicksilver and UGC items. She also took a moment to showcase some UGC art, like Silverwing’s new fences and cursed lemon cow! Then Heidi worked the taskboard and animal care on some cool lands like 1470, 178, 179, 1845, 1034, and 1699 while Luke answered your questions.

Questions from the AMA

What is new player retention? You need players to be sustainable. RORS is financially sustainable. Without a growing user base RORS is not important.
RORS was the most important first step, and now we can focus on new user acquisition.

Daily grinder retention is decreasing and the current gameplay is not suitable for new players. You mentioned there will be a nice update for new players, please share the progress with us on that.
Yes and no. In the beginning, there were certain users in the game purely to extract as much $PIXEL as possible, so it’s normal to see a drop-off now. Through the Stacked offer wall, we can still give rewards to these players while capping them. It’s not good for anyone for 1% of users to take 50% of the rewards from everyone else.

How are the rewards of USDC going to be distributed to a 1:1 ratio?
USDC will become more like a reward treasury. When we convert, we’ll convert to the same amount of USDC. Then you’ll see that your reward in the game won’t fluctuate based on $PIXEL price. The reward amount and reward pool will become stable.

A USDC is higher in value though than $PIXEL - won’t it result in more people cashing out to USDC?
It could allow only cash out into USDC and turn $PIXEL into a stake-only token long term.

Will need reputation be lowered for new player to get access to the market? I think this is the part many new players leave because the start is too grindy.
That’s one of the big issues for day 1-7 retention, which is why we want to change the economics towards USDC in the long term, have new user flows, new UA channels like Stacked/paid UA, and building out endgame features to make Pixels feel more complete.

What would be an incentive of holding $PIXEL if it’s only purpose is to stake (no spend utility)?
To yield from staking. We need to maintain enough margin to have staking rewards that are still competitive and make users want to hold $PIXEL. More people hold $PIXEL to sell than to spend.

Did you abandoned the Union forces to their fate? The war has been going on since February 5th, my friend. Is your development team going to intervene in this situation?
The season will end when someone wins. We’re giving out animal rewards because 1. we need to slowly distribute them, and 2. it will encourage more bountyfall gameplay.

ur removing the value of $PIXEL
We’re trying to remove sell-pressure from $PIXEL, and this works if there’s sufficient reason to stake $PIXEL.

If you buy ig rewards USDC where do you spend $PIXEL
Instead of focusing on players having to do stuff with $PIXEL, we would focus on getting people who don’t know anything about Pixels to care.

NFTs at minimum with marketplaces would be awesome and so many Web2 games could easily turn on some kind of token/NFT use
We completely agree and we’re moving in the Stacked direction because play-to-earn is very effective for growing a game. If it’s sustainable, the model is amazing, and there are already certain Web2 cases of p2e. We can make a p2e ecosystem where everyone who believes in p2e can own the $PIXEL token while making the games work.

Only people rewarded are content creators and code developers of most popular faucets, players aren’t rewarded
The majority of circulating supply has been given to Pixels players.

Yeah but now you’re going to Web2
We’re not, all of this is backed on chain and people have a chance to stake in the $PIXEL ecosystem. The user acquisition methods and player experience for some players is Web2 friendly, but the core fundamental thing we’re doing is contributing to the $PIXEL foundation and ecosystem. We want to see the $PIXEL ecosystem thrive.

What happened to getting ad revenue
Part of the issue is that nobody wants to place ads on Web3 games, and that’s where Stacked comes into play. If we transition earnings and crypto into Stacked and have the earnings in core Pixels not be as in your face about Web3 but still have Web3 on the back end and foundation, then we can do traditional Web2 UA funnels.

What would it look like to get Pixels onto a more traditionally Web2 platform like Steam?
If we want to get on something like Steam, Web3 can’t be directly in the game, it has to be in Stacked. A normal player playing the game, if they never looked at Stacked, they would just play the game like normal. If they do care about rewarded play, they will still get the rewards through the Stacked app.

Wen pump
We’re still trying to do everything in a legit and responsible way.

Luke- as a founder what are you most excited for in the next year?
The Pixels team has leveled up a lot with internal AI tooling and we’re able to do a lot more than before. People who want to build hard things will be able to do it quicker and I’m excited to use the tools of AI to bring the Pixels vision to fruition more quickly. Software is probably going to be very different in 2-3 years. If you’re just building a game or SaaS product, I don’t think that’s a good business anymore. If you’re building something that has a moat with data, network effects, etc., there’s real potential there. That’s what I believe with Stacked and everything else we’ve been working on behind the scenes at Pixels. The Pixels team is still working just as hard as they did when TGE because we believe we have something that will have a long-term moat as well. I think crypto and Web3 will offer really interesting ways to give people stake and upside into interesting projects if they’re done right with good founders behind them.