Froga

Kokak!!!

[Froga @Frogadier21]

Happy Birthday Luke! @whatslukedoing
Kampai ! 🍻🥂🍗🍖

From my Speck to yours
@heidichristne @pixels_online

[Froga @Frogadier21]

still dedicated to play? why not , this is part of my daily life routine. #pixelsxyz @pixels_online

[Luke Barwikowski 🚜 @whatslukedoing]

Sorry to everyone who roots for web3 gaming to fail - woke up today and decided to keep building.

This week a lot of mine and the team's time will be fleshing out systems design for @pixels_online that will enable more UGC and deeper integration into staking. I have a strong feeling that tapping into community development is what a game like Pixels actually needs for it to level up.

Generally my thinking is...

1⃣ Give the community the tools and ability to contribute to game mechanics, world building, and

One of the super-powers of web3 is community. We often get of criticism from people telling us all of the things we SHOULD have built. The reality is any game in live-service has a ton of constraints when it comes to what they actually CAN build.

Whether people want to admit it or not Pixels was at massive scale with hundreds of thousands of real DAU, millions of players, and we peaked at 1m DAA - it is quite hard to manage a live economy and build new experimental features at the same time. A centralized team can only do so much at once.

The reason I am pushing towards a more open-source approach with Pixels now is I am trying to reason through how we might push through that constraint and allow for more things to get built with the community at hand.

This is not a small thing to do - this will still require months of development to get working. We had pen-testers write thorough audits of how we might open-source both the frontend and backend of Pixels and we have a pretty clear roadmap on how to do it safely. (If we just open-sourced the code as-is it may not be safe to do so for the current game economy and other sensitive areas).

I do believe this could potentially be a major unlock when it comes to features, functionality, and new game experiments though.

2⃣ Keep economic systems rigid, still enforce value flow towards the PIXEL economy

This is where I believe @stacked_app and our current staking setup will come into play. We are fortunate that we built both our Staking System and Stacked to handle B2B use-cases.

My general thinking is that we will fork @stacked_app and provide the rails that will still allow for PIXEL payments and rewards inside of @pixels_online's open-source version and we can still have that value flow through the existing staking system too.

@stacked_app's infrastructure would be able to allow for rewards to be distributed from Pixels in a manner that is sustainable and protected as well. Ex: stacked can actually give/budget rewards from game-specific / fork-specific wallets that could be self-funded through revenue made in forks / main-game. We could enforce / bake sustainability in and provide easy rails to hook up into this as well. This also relieves any fork from the pressure of needing to figure out regulatory compliance - as the foundation has already built out that framework to do so.

Also... We also have a new build coming out for Chubkins.

Only 1 more build until chubkins is 'released', out of early access and we start optimizing towards growth. We have spent close to six figures of ad spend so far optimizing our paid funnels, and they are looking very promising and it looks like Chubkins will be able to reliably and profitably grow through paid UA given our actual CAC with real-ads now. I do expect it to take a few months to hit it's groove though once we are out of early access.

Chubkins will also become a part of the Pixels staking ecosystem as well soon - it is already generating some revenue through IAPs.

One thing we probably will do soon as well is to make staking blended across the Pixel ecosystem and reflect all economic activity across the ecosystem, rather than making stakers choose 1 game to stake to. If you are currently staking you do not need to make any changes, you will not need to unstake and restake.

Still a bit to figure out and flesh out here. As sad as yesterday was, there is still a very interesting path forward for Pixels and many positive developments coming.

[Froga @Frogadier21]

@PixelCatGuy sticked to the greeeeen frogBOB!!!!

[Pixel Cat Guy @PixelCatGuy]

🎉🎂 GM Farmers! It’s Bob’s Birthday! 🎂🎉

Our favorite magical little menace, Bob, has somehow survived another trip around the sun without turning himself into a potato. To celebrate, we're giving away 3 Bobs to 3 lucky winners! 🪄👹

🎁 How to Enter:
✅ Like, Comment, Retweet 
✅ Jump into Pixels Online and visit Bob Island 🏝️
✅ Snap a photo at Bobs island 
✅ Drop your pic in comments tagging @pixels_online 👀🫵

🧙 About Bob
For those who don't know, Bob is a rare magical creature known for:

Stealing unattended sandwiches 🥪
Casting spells he found in cereal boxes
Getting lost on his own island 🏝️
Celebrating birthdays for an entire month 🎂

Three lucky farmers will adopt a Bob of their very own.

Good luck, and remember:
Be Like Bob 👾

#PixelsOnline #BobsBirthday #Giveaway

[Froga @Frogadier21]

@ClassicsCrypto Gm

[Froga @Frogadier21]

@whatslukedoing @BidamanGaming 🙏🏻

[Luke Barwikowski 🚜 @whatslukedoing]

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.

[Pixels @pixels_online]

Guess how many Lilies were planted during the Lily of the Valley event 🪻

Comment below!!

🐝 The closest answer wins a bee NFT pet 🐝

[Froga @Frogadier21]

@pixels_online 1,039,220 🐸🐸🐸

[Froga @Frogadier21]

@ClassicsCrypto FortSt John here

[Froga @Frogadier21]

@stacked_app @pixels_online unHOPpy laugh pls

[Froga @Frogadier21]

@stacked_app @pixels_online How does a frog feel when he has a broken leg???

[Froga @Frogadier21]

@ezgicodes I like it

[Froga @Frogadier21]

@ClassicsCrypto Why not Jay B 😂

[Froga @Frogadier21]

Wait!!! @stacked_app from LVL 76 now I’m 80. Thanks for giving a worthy grind just took 3-4 days for 4 levels though my work is getting my way everyday 🤪 I managed to put time and effort for this freakin’ reward 🫠 @pixels_online #grind

[Froga @Frogadier21]

@ClassicsCrypto @PixelCatGuy @pixels_online Lovely community 🥰💕

[Pixel Cat Guy @PixelCatGuy]

The @pixels_online community did it again!

Absolute scenes from the maze, to the race & stRIGGEDae striking again!

Thank you @ClassicsCrypto for yet another hilarious stream, @biggunn01 for helping manage the chaos 🥳

A HUGE shout out to everyone who helped make another fun and successful event @SSofWhales @FarmHandsNFT @MarsCatsVoyage @PixiGummies @PixelWeirdos @pixolotl_NFTs @TheGrimHead @DizzyDragonsNFT @NenzyWenzy @Pixels_Chicken @heidichristne @dimitra_pixels & the Pixels devs who work quietly in the BG making everything possible

[Stacked @stacked_app]

it’s time!!! merch giveaway!! 😱📣

like, rt & comment something funny

there will be 3 packages shipped filled with goodies

go go goooooooo

[Froga @Frogadier21]

@Efe_Calyps @pixels_online @PixiGummies Happy birthday 🎂🎉

[₊˚ ʚ🌷ɞ. ♡ 𝘊𝑎𝘭𝑦𝘱𝑠 ♡ @Efe_Calyps]

Happy birthday to me! 🎂🩷
I could not miss taking a picture in this decoration they made with so much love, I appreciate it so much.
Thank you to @pixels_online and thank you to the community.
And to @PixiGummies for making my birthday inside the server so sweet. 🥹✨