Pixels' Second Anniversary: The Pixel Art Farming Chain Game of the Ronin Ecosystem in the Metaverse

~Author: Joyce, blockbeats~

According to Coingecko data, the token Ronin of the Ethereum sidechain Ronin Network has seen a significant increase in the past week, with a weekly rise of 63.3%, priced at $0.82 at the time of writing.

Additionally, according to Nansen data, the number of active wallet addresses on Ronin has doubled in recent days, soaring to over 7,000. Although there is no clear data pointing to this, the community generally believes that this growth is driven by the recently promoted game Pixels on Ronin.

In 2022, Pixels completed a $2.4 million seed round of financing, led by Animoca Brands and PKO Investments, with participation from OpenSea and others. On October 31, 2023, Pixels migrated to Ronin, which was launched by Sky Mavis, the producer of Axie Infinity, and is an EVM blockchain specifically designed for gaming.

Just over a week after migrating to Ronin, coinciding with the second anniversary of Pixels on November 10, what makes Pixels' gameplay special? How has the ecosystem progressed since migrating to the Ronin chain? BlockBeats has compiled relevant information on this.

Core Concept of Pixels

Pixels is a metaverse farming game launched in 2021, recreating the atmosphere of classic 16-bit role-playing adventures, allowing players to navigate in a pixel art world, interact with each other, cultivate land, play mini-games, and earn token rewards. It also allows holders of selected NFT profile pictures (PFP) collectibles to use their owned avatars in the game.

For a P2E game to operate robustly, the team needs mature thinking. The Pixels team's vision can be understood from three aspects: gameplay fun, interoperability, and decentralization.

In terms of gameplay fun, Pixels' design allows all types of users to experience the joy of gaming. Community KOL @0xPixelPenguin believes that the rich gameplay and ecosystem of Pixels can meet the needs of different groups. Professional players can choose to spend money to decorate their Land NFTs and earn land tax by allowing other players to farm on their land; casual players can "work" for professional players to earn wages. Additionally, players can participate in irregular events led by the team (such as Thanksgiving turkeys, Easter eggs, etc.) to earn rewards.

In terms of interoperability, Pixels leverages the unique advantages of blockchain games—Pixels has achieved the first NFT integration, allowing users to connect their Metamask wallets and roam in the Pixels world as their NFTs. According to the Pixels team, over 50 NFT collections have been integrated so far. "In our view, discussions about the metaverse refer to: an interconnected grid composed of adventures, games, and spaces, where your digital identity can flow."

In terms of the concept of decentralization, Pixels adopts a product-first approach, gradually achieving decentralization. Early decentralization is mainly reflected in the ownership of in-game items on-chain, but many game mechanics are executed on the server side, which can speed up development and shorten response times, thus providing a better gaming experience for players. In the future, the actual implementation of mechanisms can be migrated on-chain and into contracts.

Early decisions will also be mainly concentrated in the Pixels team to focus on the long-term health of the ecosystem in the early stages. The team is envisioning and building a decision-making system that allows for decentralized financial management, economic planning, and more. As the game and ecosystem mature, more systems can also begin to be decentralized.

Gameplay

Create an account: Go to the game homepage, click PLAY FOR FREE. Currently, you need to create a game account through the Ronin wallet.

After creating an account, you can start the beginner tasks. Some players have shared the specific steps to complete the beginner tasks.

Interoperability: NFT Integration

Pixels' tools allow for native integration with other projects, including tokens, land NFTs, utility NFTs, and PFP NFTs. Currently, Pixels has integrated over 0 NFT brands for in-game avatars, including BAYC, Crypto Phunks, and more. Users can integrate more NFT collections here.

Some NFTs integrated by Pixels

Token Economics

There are three types of assets in the Pixels Universe: land, resources, and tokens, all of which are stored on-chain. Plots are the floating land features of the Pixels universe. Players can choose to settle on three types of plots, each with its own inherent privileges and limitations.

Land

Free and rented plots are mainly single-player game instances, and players' farms cannot be seen by visitors. Players can access game features without owning a plot of land.

Free plots: Also known as Specks, this is the most basic type, allowing players to engage in basic agricultural activities. Free plots do not offer many features and provide yields far lower than other types.

Rented plots: Rented plots provide players with more freedom, better yields, and decoration space, but the downside is that players must rent them out, which means using this type of plot will forfeit most of the rewards.

Owned plots: Owned plots provide players with additional space, features, and the highest income/returns among all plot types. Owned plots have two variants: small owned NFTs and large owned NFTs, each with its corresponding yield levels.

Landowners have unique benefits related to land ownership, and all industries can be utilized on owned land, with some industries being exclusive to owned land. Landowners increase the value of NFTs through work, industrialization, automation, and decoration NFTs. Active industries are limited by the available land area but are overall unlimited. As long as there is enough land area, land can be sealed at any time, and a new industry can be initiated.

Landowners have the richest interactive tapestry in Pixels. They can manage their land resources themselves, benefit from tenant-produced land, and also become tenants on other owned lands.

Each NFT farm will have available resources and the highest level of resources not found on public land (including free tenant Specks and rented tenant land). Players obtain these resources by establishing tenant relationships with landowners.

Resources

Resource generation is the main faucet in the game. To prevent land and resource inflation, as Pixels updates, it becomes increasingly difficult to collect more rare and hard-to-obtain resources—players need to invest time and effort to continuously gather higher-quality resources.

The Pixels team adjusts the quantity of resources generated over a given time period through several variables, including restock time, inputs required to increase resources, how much resource is generated per operation, and how much effort is needed to harvest such resources.

Tenants

The tenant system is how F2P players play the game. Players can freely harvest, plant, and sell. Rented land will be fully rented out and not owned by players. As long as players can pay the rent, the land will always be allocated to their accounts. As players accumulate game resources, they will be able to rent larger plots of land.

Tenants can build new skill upgrades by working in the industries of the NFT farm.

Since there may be many more non-landowners than landowners, multiple tenants can establish the same relationship with a single landowner's industry. However, establishing multiple relationships does not yield cumulative benefits. In production leveling, it is important to actively manage and maintain continuity of production. Landowners can also be tenants. At the same time, landowners can personally manage their industries as players, oversee tenants using their land, and work as skilled laborers on other landowners' lands.

Tokens

Pixels adopts a dual-token system, namely BERRY and PIXEL. Both tokens are intended to have no upper limit on total supply, and the utilities unlocked by each currency are completely different, as are their acquisition methods.

$BERRY

$BERRY is the main circulating currency in Pixels, crucial to the core game loop, easily accessible and earnable in the game.

In the early stages of the game, $BERRY is obtained through the in-game store. Players will be able to sell their generated resources to our in-game store in exchange for $BERRY.

The main destruction mechanism is driven by purchasing in-game items to further develop players in the game loop, unlocking new industries, activities, areas, quests, and content; players without land also need $BERRY to maintain their land.

Pixels has several levers to adjust the input supply of $BERRY, including controlling resource generation (adjusting resource restock time, the number of inputs required to generate resources, the output of given resources, the effort needed to harvest granular resources, and the energy required to complete certain actions) and adjusting prices in the in-game store.

In the future, Pixels may also limit or even eliminate the in-game store, completely stopping the minting of new $BERRY.

$PIXEL

$PIXEL is the premium currency in the game, used to purchase items, upgrades, and enhancements that are not part of Pixels' core game loop and are harder to obtain. Players acquire $PIXEL for higher demands, such as saving game time, enhancing social status, etc.

Unlike $BERRY, the supply of $PIXEL will be strictly controlled and predictable. Each day, 100,000 new $PIXEL will be minted. Then, the new $PIXEL will be distributed to active players participating in expected behavior patterns beneficial to the Pixels ecosystem.

A significant portion of $PIXEL distribution is completed through a daily reward system for completing various tasks, missions, or finding specific items. The team will also reward other behaviors, such as creating unique user-generated content, incentivizing more users to participate, and engaging with the community, among others.

Premium items will be available for purchase in the in-game store, and the store will not buy back items. Revenue will be sent to a treasury managed by Pixels, which may burn a large portion of the revenue daily.

Team and Development

The Pixels team has extensive experience in game products. Founder Luke Barwikowski started coding at the age of 12 and built and sold applications by 18. Engineers BenJamin Exworthy and Garr Godfrey are co-founders of the renowned American game developer GameHouse.

In February 2022, Pixels completed a $2.4 million seed round led by Animoca Brands and PKO Investments, with participation from OpenSea and others. This funding will be used to comprehensively build and expand the initial features of the game, preparing for the launch of Tken planned for the end of Q2 2022; in October, Pixels airdropped reward tokens $BERRY to the top 20,000 players in the community ranking.

Ecosystem Activity After Migration to Ronin

On September 12, Pixels announced its migration from Polygon to the Ronin network. On October 31, Pixels announced that it had launched on the Ronin Network, while also opening the minting of Pixels Pets (NFTs with instant game utility) on the Ronin Chain. In the announcement, Pixels stated, "The community has always been our driving force. And Ronin has more Web3 users than any other blockchain network."

On the day of launching on Ronin, there was a noticeable increase in transaction volume within Pixels. A week after the launch, UAW rose by over 500%. According to the team, Pixel will launch the $PIXELS governance token in Q4.

BlockBeats found that among the KOLs promoting Pixels, many are deep players of Axie Infinity. Additionally, the founder of Ronin and Axie Infinity, Jihoz, appeared among the NPCs of Pixel. Jihoz often promotes Pixels on his official account, stating, "Honestly, Pixels has the early feel of Axie."

It is certain that this migration is a "win-win." DappRadar Ambassador @0xxNathan stated on X, "We can see the perfect synergy formed between Pixel and Ronin with strong support from the Ronin community. This indicates that Ronin is likely to become one of the best blockchain networks for all games, thanks to their outstanding and loyal community."

Recently, the blockchain gaming market has shown signs of recovery following the overall market trend, and Pixels has already begun to show results. BlockBeats previously reported that on November 7, according to Blur market information, the floor price of NFTs in the blockchain gaming sector rose across the board. Among them, the floor price of Pixels land NFTs reached 0.39 ETH, with a weekly increase of 59.18%.

On November 10, the Pixels team announced in Discord that the daily active users of Pixels had exceeded 55,000, stating, "We know that there will be more growth in the coming months, and we need to prepare for 100k+ DAU."

How much support Ronin can provide for Pixels, and whether Pixels can become the second Axie Infinity on Ronin, remains to be seen.