Continuing Blockchain Gaming World’s weekly cadence, here comes episode 154, which was a conversation with Pixels’ CEO and CTO Luke Barwikowski.
I’d not spoke to Luke before but came away from the chat very impressed, both with his obvious technical and entrepreneurial talents, as well as his clear thinking and ambition.
If nothing else, it’s always interesting to hear about how someone who was mining Bitcoin aged 13, who then rejected crypto on the basis of economic theory learned at university, before finally deciding to pivot a failing tech company into what became Pixels — currently the most popular blockchain game with 170,000 daily active unique wallets — in 2021.
Some readers will also be pleased to hear of the inspiration of both RuneScape and EVE Online in this process!
That stated, I think what marks Pixels out from many current web3 games is how it’s demonstrated its community-first ethos, both in terms of communication and how it rewards its players. This isn’t the usual community-first lip service.
A notable topic in our conversation in this regard was how Luke spoke about how Pixels was thinking about the different personas in its player base, and how best to reward them for their activity, while also ensuring a strong business model for the developer.
Of course, another core element was the result of his decision to move from the Polygon blockchain to Ronin, and how working with Sky Mavis has helped build on that initial growth.
“You just have to be in web3 to understand the problems that come with it,” he says. “And Ronin, Axie Infinity, Sky Mavis, they’re the only team in web3 that actually achieved scale in web3 gaming before.”
As ever, you can check out a transcript at BlockchainGamer.biz.
Sponsored by Hiro Capital: investor in Keen Games, whose Enshrouded has surpassed one million players in four days of Steam early access.
Calendar
Heroes of Mavia’s launch is now boosted by airdrop — 31st January
MixMob’s MXM token goes live — 1st February
Xociety’s latest playtest — 1st February
Ubisoft-backed The Watch opens alpha access — 2nd February
Heroes of Mavia launches MAVIA token — 6th February
Synergy Land launches land sale and mainnet — 22nd February
Further AOFverse news
Following yesterday’s bust up between NFT whale Dingaling and web3 mobile game outfit AOFverse comes further nuance to the thorny question of NFT activism.
As expected, AOFverse has posted a general apology for the situation but has also revealed the pressure it’s been under from NFT whales — Dingaling isn’t specifically mentioned — who wanted more token rewards delivered quicker than AOFverse wanted.
It said there was an eventual settled negotiation — a distribution of 10 million AFG tokens with a 3 month cliff into a 15% unlock etc — only for “some prominent holders” to then ask for much more generous terms. These were refused and the situation played out.
If nothing else, it goes to show that NFT whales are not always reliable narrators, even — perhaps especially when — they claim to be acting in a non-financial manner!
TreasureDAO Love Triange Square news
File under emerging news, but it looks like there’s a love square developing as Ethereum L2 networks look to woo gaming ecosystem TreasureDAO.
Currently running on Arbitrum, TreasureDAO is in the process of rolling out details of its forthcoming Treasure Chain, with most of the community appearing to favour the status quo. However, rival ecosystems Optimism and now zkSync have tabled proposals to encourage the ecosystem to move elsewhere.
Watch this space.
Additional Links
A rare bionic double Japanese Axie NFT just sold for $251,257.
Solana RPG Tatsumeeko is opening up for its first playtest. Apply here.
Dogami has started staking for its DOGA token; best rate is 15% APR (locked for 3 months).
Zilliqa FPS Web3Web sold $100,000-worth of tokens in 3 minutes.
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