197 | How Apptokens will make Pixels sustainable and successful

Jon Jordan talks to Pixels CEO Luke Barwikowski about the game’s forthcoming adoption of the new Apptokens standard, which as well as seeing the launch of the spend/stake-only vPIXEL token, will also herald a new staking model, which will use the token to boost marketing for Pixels and its partner games.

• [4:42] Games like Axie and Pixels have been massive successes. We need to make them sustainable.
• [5:25] Some of the issues for web3 games are just gaming issues. Web2 games are not doing well.
• [7:50] DAUs is not the primary metric for Pixels. It's secondary compared to net revenue.
• [9:00] We thought we could convert DAUs into paying users. We can but the rate is very low.
• [11:45] In particularly, it's hard to convert paying users into net paying users.
• [13:53] We're doing a lot of work to figure out who are the right users to give incentives to.
• [18:20] The three elements that are required to make a great web3 game.
• [19:10] Explaining how ERC721C enforced NFT royalties aligns incentives for devs and NFT traders.
• [20:50] Apptokens (ERC20C) do something similar for fungible tokens.
• [21:38] A lot of the players we give PIXEL tokens to just sell them - this is misalignment.
• [21:50] Apptokens allows us to give more tokens to players who spend them in-game.
• [22:25] We're doing this with our new vPIXEL token, which can only be staked or spent, not sold.
• [23:48] We want to preference players who use the PIXEL tokens through its tokenomics.
• [27:36] This is going to be the industry-standard soon. [28:41] The new staking system embraces all the games published in the Pixels ecosystem.
• [28:50] This sees 28 million PIXEL distributed monthly via these games, giving rewards to stakers.
• [33:17] This won't be limited to Ronin games, although the staking contracts will be on Ronin.
• [34:47] How the core Pixels game will fit into this new multi-game PIXEL token ecosystem.
• [36:35] Pixels is launching a mobile-first Tamagotchi-style pet app in June/July.
• [38:27] Players who want to convert vPIXEL to PIXEL will pay a c.50% withdrawal fee.
• [40:47] It doesn't matter how web3 a game is. What matters is whether it works.
• [42:30] Pixels has given out over $100 million of rewards in terms of PIXEL tokens.