I have been increasingly feeling that our understanding of P2E needs to be completely refreshed. It’s not a minor fix; it requires a complete re-discussion of the foundational definitions.
The reason is that I was chatting with a friend who does data analysis for blockchain games. He said something that left me stunned for a while: “Currently, more than half of the P2E projects on the market are essentially not games, but user value filters. It's just that before, they filtered who came early, and now they filter who is worth keeping.” He gave an example, saying that in the first week of a certain project's launch, thirty thousand addresses flooded in, and in the second week, twenty-eight thousand left. Among the two thousand that stayed, one thousand eight were small accounts that used scripts to open multiple accounts. In the end, there were less than two hundred real players, yet the reward pool was completely drained.
This situation has led me to rethink the Stacked system that Pixels has been promoting recently. Many people understand it as an AI-driven refined operational tool — analyzing user behavior, predicting churn risk, and distributing incentives in a targeted manner. It sounds like the stuff that big internet companies have been playing with for years, nothing surprising. But if you place it in the context of blockchain games, the nature is completely different.
What’s the difference? Internet companies use this system to make you spend more, stay longer, and contribute more advertising value. In contrast, blockchain project teams use this system to determine who is qualified to take real money out of the ecosystem. There lies an essential question: are rewards a cost or an investment?
If it's a cost, then the logic is 'complete the task → issue rewards → players cash out → project teams foot the bill.' The reason this model doesn't work has been proven by countless projects that have gone to zero — the more rewards are issued, the greater the selling pressure, the lower the coin price, and the faster players leave. The day the project team runs out of funding is the countdown to death.
But what if we view rewards as investments? Then the entire logic is reversed. Before any reward is issued, the system first calculates: after this person receives this reward, can their behavior create value for the ecosystem that exceeds the reward itself? If yes, issue it; if no, either don’t issue or issue less. This isn’t being stingy; it’s a bottom-line thinking on investment returns.
What Stacked does is this. It analyzes the behavioral characteristics of each address in real time in the background — not just simple online duration and click counts, but multidimensional behavioral patterns. For example, the operation intervals of real players are random, while script operation intervals are uniform like a metronome; real players have reciprocal social interactions, while bot accounts only perform actions that yield rewards; real players occasionally wander, zone out, or do 'useless' things, while bot accounts always take the optimal path.
These details may seem small when viewed individually, but together they form a precise portrait. Stacked uses this portrait to do two things: first, change rewards from 'universal distribution' to 'targeted investment'; second, 'starve' players who are not worth investing in — not by banning accounts, but by making it increasingly difficult for them to obtain decent returns within the system.
This brings us back to the judgment I mentioned in my title: this round, P2E is actively clearing players.
Moreover, those being eliminated are not the 'inactive players' you might think. Inactive players with real behavioral traces will actually be accurately pulled back by Stacked. A friend of mine is a typical example; he played Pixels for over six months but did not log in for two months. On his first day back, he received a targeted recall reward, even greater than when he played every day. He asked me why, and I said because the system marked you as a 'high-value intermittent player'; it fears you might actually leave.
Which group of people has really been eliminated? Those who run multiple scripts, pure profit seekers, and arbitrageurs who never participate in the ecosystem but only take advantage. These individuals contribute almost zero value to the ecosystem but are the biggest consumers of the reward pool. Previously, project teams had no way to deal with them because the cost of identification was too high. With tools like Stacked, identification costs have dropped drastically, and the next step is naturally precise elimination.
This is not just a matter for Pixels alone. Once the Stacked model is validated as effective, external studios will start to integrate. The more studios that connect, the faster the data flywheel turns, and the more accurate the screening model becomes. By then, the allocation rules for the entire blockchain gaming sector will be rewritten — it will no longer be 'first come, first served' or 'quick hands get rewards, slow hands miss out,' but 'if the algorithm thinks you deserve it, only then will you get it.'
To be honest, this trend makes some people very uncomfortable. Because it breaks a long-standing unwritten agreement in the crypto circle: as long as I'm diligent enough, smart enough, and fast enough, I can profit from the system. Now the system has started to pick and choose, and the criteria for selection are no longer up to you, but dictated by the algorithm.
But for another group of people, this is actually good news. Those who genuinely want to play games, are willing to spend time in the ecosystem, and are not in a hurry to cash out, no longer have to compete with script runners for food. Your labor will not be diluted by mass-produced alternate accounts, your retention will be valued by the system, and your worth will be weighted by the algorithm.
Writing this, I feel it’s necessary to be even more straightforward: P2E is transitioning from a 'traffic logic' to a 'value logic.' Previously, project teams only cared about attractive daily active user data, regardless of whether you were a person or a script; as long as you logged in, it counted. Now, project teams care about real retention and ecosystem contributions; players who look good on data but are entirely superficial will be deemed negative assets by the system.
Therefore, my standards for evaluating blockchain gaming projects have changed. I am no longer concerned about graphics quality, IP, or the grand visions in the white papers. I only focus on three signals: whether external studios are willing to integrate into this screening system, whether the rewards issued truly translate into retention data, and whether core assets like PIXEL are continuously consumed within the ecosystem rather than flowing out unidirectionally. When all three signals align, it indicates that the allocation rules are genuinely changing.
The last question is left for you, the reader of this article: when the system starts screening players, are you among those being weighted, or among those being starved? The answer to this question may be more important than how many accounts you have. #BTC