“We don’t have to guess what features to build. We utilize this giant community that we already have, get their feedback, and build with them.” – Luke Barwikowski Founder and CEO.
Pixels evolved from a virtual spaces company to a gaming platform with an NFT collection and game called Farmland. One of the things the Pixels team has focused on is building a world that creates actual demand for tokens and NFTs, as well as incentivizing growth in the ecosystem through token incentives.
Pixels took a community-driven approach by building exciting user experiences through constant feedback and evolution. Additionally, interoperability allows players to use assets they already own as part of their identity online within the game, leading to a unique market for NFTs rather than just high floor prices.
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We would love to hear more about your background. What are your thoughts on making game economies successful? Where do you see the future of Web3 gaming economies going?
Yeah, I’m swinging back and forth on how I feel about this. It’s interesting because we would go and pitch our game in 2021 and people would always ask about tokenomics, and what they meant about tokenomics was focusing on the supply side of tokenomics.
How is your token supply going to shrink over the long run? And I never like thinking about tokenomics in that sense. When we’re thinking about building a game with a good economy, we think about how we create actual demand for tokens and how we create real demand for NFTs. And when we’re thinking about the demand side, we’re thinking about your need to build a game people want to play.
But there’s a massive problem within Web2 games, where essentially what happens in Web2 is they will spend millions on building a game, and they’ll spend like $10 million a month on advertising their game. All their budget goes into user acquisition. And now, with Web3, we’re interested in skipping that middle layer where we don’t need to spend so much on UA, where we don’t need to spend all of our games budgets and handing it directly over to Apple or Google or Facebook. Instead, we have these token incentives to grow our game for us. It’s all about building out a network of incentives that help your game grow, help the ecosystem grow, and build a whole network of whatever you want to achieve.
There are many farming RPGs; what differentiates yours from others like Stardew Valley?
Yeah, we took a really community-driven approach to how we build. If you look at our Discord, things feel different than many other NFT projects. Our community is very wholesome. They’re into the actual game. For example, we banned swearing in our Discord, which was highly controversial a while ago. A lot of the NFT Flippers didn’t love that. But, building a community that actually likes what we’re doing and then building in public and building with them has allowed us to create an exciting experience for our users.
We’re doing AMAs every single week, asking our users for feedback, and, in a sense, building with them. This game has evolved into something that these players have helped create.
We’ve been able to add many features just based on that, and other than that, obviously there’s this level of interoperability that you wouldn’t get in other games as well. Where you can take in assets you already own and other NFTs you own and use them as part of your identity online, and it’s interesting to see all of the NFT collections that popped up. I buy NFTs, and a lot of our community buys NFTs just because they look cute in our game.
We see you have a lot of NFT integrations: Can you tell us more about the integrations and how they impact the game? Any other exciting partnerships coming?
Right now, we integrate with just Ethereum, but we’re about to release some stuff on Polygon, so we’re about to add Polygon support. We have done over 70 NFT integrations now, which is pretty crazy. We have an excellent pipeline around it, so it’s not too hard for us to do. And we have very good guidelines if you want to bootstrap it yourself.
It’s an interesting addition to these other NFT collections because you have a fantastic looking NFT in the game. People see it, and then they kind of want to buy another one that looks like it. There’s this tiny NFT collection called Subway Rats, and they look really cute in the game. We’ve driven so many sales to them because they integrate with us.
Most of our interest is inbound, with projects coming to us rather than our team focusing on outreach. We have a huge advantage because we have a playable game, and we can build a bunch of funnels into our ecosystem.
Web3 offers 3 things – ownership, incentive design that’s much stronger than without it, and interoperability. Ownership increases retention in our ecosystem. We’ve noticed people who own our NFTs play the game a lot more, and they come back to the game more often, which is extremely valuable for us to have retention higher to incentive design. We’ve seen that when we add token incentives, we get the behavior that we want much stronger than without. And it makes sense because there’s more liquid value attached to it. Interoperability gives us ways that we can reach new users without spending money either. It’s like a new form of distribution.
We are now in Q2 of 2023, are there any exciting developments your team is looking forward to this quarter?
We’ve been talking about the token since day one. I have been so excited about what we can do with this pixel token, and I cannot wait to get it out. We’re ready to do it, and it needs to get out for what we want to accomplish next year.
What we’re trying to accomplish is, one, getting this token out, seeing how we can use the token to grow and play with it in terms of user acquisition, and in terms of retention incentives, and all of that. And then stage two is we have a bunch of products that are ready for it as well.
We are also about to do a new mint. We haven’t charged our users for anything since the Farmland mint back in January 2022. We wanted to focus on building the community. This new mint will be done in this Pixel Token. We will also be airdropping the token to our most loyal users. We’re going to do some ecosystem rewards after that.
We’re doing recurring mints of these new NFTs. They’re going to be pets that follow you in-game. We have a full game loop and game mechanic built around these pets as well. Super excited about that! And then Pixels has also been making more aggressive moves in the user-generated content.
The Web3 space is constantly evolving, how do you see Pixels evolving along with it?
I think our long-term play is to be like the Web3 Roblox. The 2D version focuses on incentive design, what the token can do, and how it plays an integral part in growing the network, the ecosystem of builders of users, and content creators. My opinions have changed a ton over the last year and a half. I have a strong opinion that you need to iterate if you want to succeed. It’s interesting because a lot of VC companies or VC investors invest in a lot of the Web3 games, but the interesting thing is, if you’re a AAA game in Web3, you have to get it right first try because they have such large productions. This makes it hard for them to pivot or be flexible over time.
There will be AAA games in the next year and a half that hit, but many of them won’t be able to adjust to the things they need to. Our approach is a lot different. We’ve decided to scale back production and increase agility, where we think adapting to the space is probably our most important priority.
We want to be iterating and building as much as possible. Pixels has released, I think, like 50 public updates in the last 75 weeks. We were just taking feedback from our users. Our plan is always to adapt to the space. If we see something that’s not working, we will change it. If we get feedback that something needs to change, we will change it. We went through this thing a few months ago where we were building and releasing content and just kind of guessing at what would work, and then we switched in our heads where it’s like
“We don’t have to guess what features to build. We utilize this giant community that we have already, we get their feedback, and build with them.”
It’s been a game changer since we did that, where it’s so much less guesswork. We get to ask our players what they want to see, and then build it.
