🐔 Chickens are loose in Terra Villa!
Someone had a birthday. Someone released chickens. These are related.
Catch them → Get an egg → Crack it open 🥚
Event closes Wednesday at 8 PM UTC! More details below ⬇️
State of Pixels
At Pixels we have managed to make our game sustainable after years of effort - but it's still not growing!
Do not worry though - Pixels is not & will never shut off.
I want to say that clearly first because I know whenever we start talking about strategy changes, open source, Stacked, rewards, or anything like that, people can start to wonder what it means for the main game.
The thing I want to talk about is more around where we go next.
The mandate of the foundation is the growth of p2e. Growth is the mandate of any game, economy, or business.
At Pixels we have managed to do something that, honestly, very few Web3 games have done. We have kept a game alive for years, through multiple market cycles, multiple economy reworks, hundreds of gameplay updates, and a lot of very real pressure from real users, real incentives, real bots, real farmers, real holders, and real expectations.
But it is also not enough...
The reality is that Pixels is sustainable now, but it is not growing the way we want it to grow yet. And the mandate of the Pixels ecosystem / Foundation is growth. Not just keeping things alive. Not just surviving. The goal is to grow rewarded play, grow the solana:EkDGB5fbPXiRmDDjxKcC7dFjzvFZj2KT9t7oeyyPx4SX ecosystem, and keep pushing this category forward.
Well how do we grow? My take...
1) We need to optimize earnings better
2) Gameplay needs to improve
👉 Through core mechanic upgrades
👉 and better funnel optimization
How might we get there and where are our heads at now?
"We need to optimize earnings better"
Some might initially disagree when I say that this needs to be a primary focus - but the core issue is that ignoring earnings / ownership aspects of the economy actually leads to worse issues long-run. If you are building a real economy, obviously you need to plan and design the correct economic incentives.
We are still seeing that the game is still giving rewards to many users who are here for pure extraction. No matter what gameplay mechanic are added - if that is not addressed the issue stays the same regardless of gameplay added.
@stacked_app launched in March - but we have still been working on getting our full data-driven insights into the rewards of Pixels. This week are we optimizing rewards and we are attempting to see if this will lead to a lift in our internally tracked metric RORS (return on reward spend).
Currently Pixels gives rewards under it's current budgeted allocation - however, if we are able to lift RORS, we can also start to see if we can increase volume of rewards. If RORS can be maintained with higher volume, that may mean we can reliably grow Pixels and ecosystem.
"Gameplay Needs To Improve"
Pixels has something really special that I do not want to undersell: long-tail retention. There are people who have played Pixels for years at this point. There are people who have made Pixels part of their daily routine. That is very rare and something that I personally feel a huge loyalty and obligation for.
But there are also issues we need to be honest about.
1) New user retention
Historically this was good for Pixels, but has fallen over the last year - d1 retention is only sitting at ~25% now - a better target would be ~40%.
If we ever want to build paid funnels of Pixels - that d1-d7 needs to improve. We are currently building large updates that will help address this.
2) Game Mechanics
Pixels has never claimed to have the most innovative gameplay compared to web2 games - however there are things that Pixels has that not many other games have. Real earnings in the game leads to a real economy, and a lot of the social gameplay that Pixels has fostered has been unique and great at moments.
We have pushed out hundreds of gameplay updates at this point, reworked the entire game economy 3-4 times. This work has gotten us from something unsustainable to making something that is kind of working - kind of working is not good enough though.
The hard part is that there are only so many things the internal team can do at once. Pixels is a very large and complex game now. There is a lot of code, a lot of systems, a lot of legacy, and a lot of surface area.
This is one of the reasons we are seriously exploring moving Pixels toward an open-source model.
This is not 100% confirmed yet.
But if we go in this direction, the idea would be to open-source both the client and the server.
The idea would be that people could actually run Pixels, contribute to Pixels, build new features, experiment with new mechanics, or even fork their own versions of the game.
This would be a multi-month initiative if we do it. It would need to be done carefully. There are security issues, economy issues, infra issues, ownership issues, and a lot of details to get right.
Potential Open Source Plan (again, not confirmed)
To be very clear: this would not replace the current version of Pixels.
The current Pixels world would remain live. We would continue to maintain it. We would continue to update it. We would continue to protect the community and the economy.
Open source would be an expansion of the ecosystem, not a shutdown of the main game.
The way I am thinking about it right now is something like this:
Pixels becomes more open as a game.
@stacked_app becomes the infrastructure layer for rewards, payments, ownership checks, and economic rails.
solana:EkDGB5fbPXiRmDDjxKcC7dFjzvFZj2KT9t7oeyyPx4SX remains central to the ecosystem.
The official Pixels world remains live.
And community-built versions of Pixels could potentially plug into the broader ecosystem if they use the right infrastructure.
Potential solana:EkDGB5fbPXiRmDDjxKcC7dFjzvFZj2KT9t7oeyyPx4SX Economic Integration...
If someone forks the game, that does not automatically mean they get access to solana:EkDGB5fbPXiRmDDjxKcC7dFjzvFZj2KT9t7oeyyPx4SX rewards or official ecosystem support. The game code and the economy are different things.
What we would want to provide is a path where community-run experiences could connect back into Pixels / Stacked infrastructure in a controlled way. That could mean solana:EkDGB5fbPXiRmDDjxKcC7dFjzvFZj2KT9t7oeyyPx4SX payments, reward budgets, ownership checks, staking, land/NFT-related systems, or other things we still need to design.
But the high-level idea is:
open up the game
protect the economy
make solana:EkDGB5fbPXiRmDDjxKcC7dFjzvFZj2KT9t7oeyyPx4SX more useful
let the community build
keep the official world alive
Our Priorities and Promises
We have a duty to the community to make sure that we...
1. Protect the game and community people love
2. Protect the solana:EkDGB5fbPXiRmDDjxKcC7dFjzvFZj2KT9t7oeyyPx4SX ecosystem
3. Improve reward efficiency so rewards can support real growth
4. Improve gameplay and new-player retention
5. Explore open source in a way that expands Pixels instead of replacing it
6. Make stronger, more focused bets around what can actually grow the ecosystem (like new games such as chubkins)
This is a commitment of treasury, effort, and resource allocation.
We are trying to move Pixels into its next phase.
The last few years were about proving that a Web3 could become sustainable - we have done that - now we need to search for growth.
Other Growth Bets
The other thing I want to be clear about is that Pixels is not the only way we are trying to grow the ecosystem.
We are also working on Chubkins and Stacked.
The way I think about this is pretty simple:
Pixels is the world and community that proved a lot of this can work.
Stacked is the infrastructure layer we built from those lessons... Rewards, payments, data, offer design, ownership checks, and better reward targeting.
Chubkins is one of our next growth bets using that infrastructure
Chubkins has been built ground up with a more Web2-first approach. The goal is to take what we have learned from Pixels and rewarded play, but apply it to a game that can hopefully reach a broader audience, scale through more traditional paid growth, and use Stacked underneath to make rewards smarter.
We have already seen some promising early signals from Chubkins paid growth tests, which is why we are taking it seriously as a growth bet. It still needs polish, tuning, and a lot of iteration, but it gives us a cleaner place to test rewarded play, user acquisition, referrals, and reward economics in a more mainstream product - but it is nearly done with development and will be ready to start testing GTM this next month.
This does not mean Pixels becomes less important.
It means the ecosystem becomes less dependent on one game doing everything.
A lot of this is still being figured out but I prefer transparent communication with our community as we have done since the very beginning.
Pixels is alive. Pixels will keep running. And the next phase is about taking everything we have learned and turning it into a stronger ecosystem.
Fundamentals on @pixels_online are looking great these last couple weeks! New players joining every day
These are real players looking up game stats on Voxels Hub! 0% Bots
AI a year ago vs. now is crazy.
I love Claude but hate limits.
Had it setup Hermes + Qwen3.6 35B locally. "Build a wiki for @pixels_online" and it nailed it with zero hiccups.
Using local models for agentic tasks is wild. We’re living in the future
Welcome to Stacked - the next layer of the $PIXEL ecosystem.
For players: play games, earn rewards, cash out
For studios: supercharge growth, launch sustainable play-to-earn rewards in one system
Best-in-class tools built from everything we learned scaling @pixels_online.
sneak peek of the new $pixel
👉 an SDK that makes any game play-to-earn (sustainably)
👉 an AI game economist that makes live suggestions/tweaks
👉 powered by proprietary models, data, and thousands of experiments
👉 $pixel staking integration
👉 new app, new game
coming SOON
Pixels Land recorded +84% increase in trading volume in the past 30 days... 👀
Land is a buildable asset inside the Pixels universe that opens up exclusive earning opportunities:
• 10%+ staking power boost for additional staking rewards
• Build industries and gain surplus on crafting and production
• Decorate your land, host social events and mini games
Explore the collection below 👇
@HellsRaiser94@whatslukedoing The team has built an incredible community, one that can only start with the people at the top. Saw someone post a video on discord today of their mom chopping down trees, there's just something special there
🐽 MAJOR UPDATE JUST HIT THE FARM 🐽
Animal Care just got a massive upgrade!
🐮 New & improved Animals (with cute art!)
🧺 New feed + gather game loop
🐣 Hatch & raise babies
⚒️ New industries
+ a whole new VIP benefit! 💖
Check out the Pixels Post for all the info ⬇️🔗
nobody knows $pixel is cooking the next generation of p2e yet
it's coming soon... pay attention & when it's out download it quickly, early users will receive extra rewards