Having worked in engineering for a long time, I have the feeling that once the project’s quantity is miscalculated or the materials are underestimated in the early stages, the cost of patching up later is doubled.
It’s not because the materials are expensive, but because the schedule has been disrupted and the costs of coordination have surged. A small decision in design can magnify into a systemic issue during the execution phase.
The detours taken by the economic model of Pixels ($PIXEL) remind me of similar situations.
Pixels originally had two tokens. $BERRY is a soft currency that players can earn by farming, fighting monsters, and selling resources, with a large circulation; $PIXEL is a hard currency with a capped total, used for unlocking advanced features. This dual-token model looks reasonable in design, separating the soft and hard currencies, each managing its own.
But the problem lies with BERRY.
BERRY has no overall limit; as long as players operate in the game, they can continue to produce. As the user base of the game expands, the supply of BERRY skyrockets, prices drop sharply, and the BERRY that players earn becomes increasingly worthless. What's more troublesome is that a large number of robots come in specifically to cash out BERRY, diluting the earnings of normal players and trapping the game economy in an inflationary spiral.
This is a recurring death spiral in Web3 games: token output too fast → price drops → real players leave → robot proportion increases → token further depreciates.
Later, Pixels made a decision: to abolish BERRY and switch to a single coin model, keeping only $PIXEL.
The logic behind this decision is worth serious consideration. $PIXEL has a total supply cap of 500 million, with controlled output that will not be infinitely diluted. At the same time, the team has introduced a "smart token distribution" system—not simply distributing PIXEL based on activity, but using data analysis to determine which players are genuinely participating, prioritizing token allocation to those who "will reinvest the rewards back into the game" rather than those who simply sell them off.
The goal of this design, as the team put it, is "net ecological consumption"—which means that the total consumption in the game must continuously exceed the total distribution of tokens. In simple terms: the money players spend must be greater than the money the game distributes, so that the economy can operate positively and not deteriorate further.
From the data, after the Chapter 2.5 update, Pixels' intraday inflation rate has decreased by nearly 84%. This is a real economic adjustment effect, not the expectations in the white paper.
However, there is a problem here that has not been resolved. The current price of PIXEL is around 0.007, which has fallen over 99% from the historical high of $1.02 in March 2024. Even if the economic model is improving, this drop indicates that early entrants and investors have sustained significant losses, and the time needed for confidence to be restored cannot solely rely on economic data.
Additionally, on April 19, nearly 91 million PIXEL will be unlocked, accounting for about 1.8% of the total supply. There is indeed significant short-term selling pressure.
After miscalculating the workload and patching holes, the cost is double the resources and time. Abolishing BERRY was the right decision for Pixels, but this cost has already been paid by early players.
The economic model is corrected, but that does not mean the price will return immediately. These two things need to be viewed separately.