#cforcryptocommunity Studios are still paying for installs that don’t stick.
What if that budget went to players who actually stay?
i breaks it down 👇
Post
Why Stacked is Paying Players Instead of Ad Networks, Redirecting the Billions
Guys , I've been staring at game studio UA budgets and I genuinely cannot believe this industry keeps doing the same thing.
Billions of Every year. Handed straight to Meta, Google, and Apple Search.
Just to get someone to tap "Install" someone who, statistically, will quit the game before the week is out.
There has to be a smarter way to spend that money.
Turns out, there is. And it's already working.
The ad network trap is worse than you think
A single install can cost $5, $10, even $20+.
The user opens the app twice and disappears.
The studio looks at the retention curve, winces, and then... funds the same campaign next quarter.
Why? Because nobody at Meta loses sleep if your game dies.
They just need the spend to keep coming.
The incentives are completely misaligned , studios are paying for traffic, not players.
I kept thinking: what if you just skipped the middleman entirely?
Pixels asked the same question
If you haven't been following Pixels , the social farming game on Ronin it's one of the few Web3 games that actually scaled without imploding.
Part of why is something they built internally called Stacked.
Stacked started as a fix for adversarial farming inside Pixels.
Bots, exploit loops, the usual Web3 headaches.
But as they built it out, they realized it could do something more interesting: replace UA spend entirely.
The idea is straightforward. Instead of paying Meta to show ads to strangers who may never care about your game, you take that same budget and pay your actual players for doing things that matter inside the game.
Not "watch an ad for 5 gems." Actually different.
That's the thing I want to be specific about, because the knee-jerk reaction is "oh, it's just another rewards system.”It's not.
Stacked ties rewards to real in-game milestones.
Hitting a hard crafting tier. Running a coordinated guild event.
\Actions that only happen when someone is genuinely invested.
The payouts are cash, $PIXEL, or gift cards , not fake in-game currency that evaporates when the game does.
There's also an AI game economist layer sitting on top of the data.
It watches which cohorts are close to churning, finds exactly where the friction is, and fires reward campaigns at those specific players at that specific moment.
Not a spray-and-pray campaign. Surgical.
The receipts are there
200+ million rewards distributed. Over $25 million contributed to $PIXEL s revenue.
Retention goes up, LTV follows, and because everything runs on Ronin, the cost of distribution is low and the whole thing is auditable on-chain.
For a studio trying to justify this to a CFO, that auditability matters.
You're not hoping an ad campaign worked. You can see exactly what triggered, what it cost, and what player behavior followed.
Will the rest of the industry actually follow?
That's the part I'm less certain about.
Stacked is a B2B platform now any studio can use it.
The model makes sense on paper and the Pixels numbers back it up.
But studios have been writing checks to ad networks for years.
That's a comfortable habit, and comfortable habits don't die because someone else's retention metrics improved.
What might actually move the needle is the auditability.
Web3 studios are already used to on-chain accountability in a way traditional studios aren't. If enough of them run the numbers and see what Stacked actually costs versus what Meta costs for players who stick around versus players who don't , the math starts to look pretty embarrassing for the old model.
The players who stayed, leveled up, and built the game's economy get paid.
The ad network that served a banner to someone who forgot the game existed by Tuesday doesn't.
I don't know if this changes the whole industry. But I think it changes the conversation. And that's usually how it starts.
#pixel @Pixels #PİXEL #PİXEL $PIXEL $RONIN
Billions of Every year. Handed straight to Meta, Google, and Apple Search.
Just to get someone to tap "Install" someone who, statistically, will quit the game before the week is out.
There has to be a smarter way to spend that money.
Turns out, there is. And it's already working.
The ad network trap is worse than you think
A single install can cost $5, $10, even $20+.
The user opens the app twice and disappears.
The studio looks at the retention curve, winces, and then... funds the same campaign next quarter.
Why? Because nobody at Meta loses sleep if your game dies.
They just need the spend to keep coming.
The incentives are completely misaligned , studios are paying for traffic, not players.
I kept thinking: what if you just skipped the middleman entirely?
Pixels asked the same question
If you haven't been following Pixels , the social farming game on Ronin it's one of the few Web3 games that actually scaled without imploding.
Part of why is something they built internally called Stacked.
Stacked started as a fix for adversarial farming inside Pixels.
Bots, exploit loops, the usual Web3 headaches.
But as they built it out, they realized it could do something more interesting: replace UA spend entirely.
The idea is straightforward. Instead of paying Meta to show ads to strangers who may never care about your game, you take that same budget and pay your actual players for doing things that matter inside the game.
Not "watch an ad for 5 gems." Actually different.
That's the thing I want to be specific about, because the knee-jerk reaction is "oh, it's just another rewards system.”It's not.
Stacked ties rewards to real in-game milestones.
Hitting a hard crafting tier. Running a coordinated guild event.
\Actions that only happen when someone is genuinely invested.
The payouts are cash, $PIXEL, or gift cards , not fake in-game currency that evaporates when the game does.
There's also an AI game economist layer sitting on top of the data.
It watches which cohorts are close to churning, finds exactly where the friction is, and fires reward campaigns at those specific players at that specific moment.
Not a spray-and-pray campaign. Surgical.
The receipts are there
200+ million rewards distributed. Over $25 million contributed to $PIXEL s revenue.
Retention goes up, LTV follows, and because everything runs on Ronin, the cost of distribution is low and the whole thing is auditable on-chain.
For a studio trying to justify this to a CFO, that auditability matters.
You're not hoping an ad campaign worked. You can see exactly what triggered, what it cost, and what player behavior followed.
Will the rest of the industry actually follow?
That's the part I'm less certain about.
Stacked is a B2B platform now any studio can use it.
The model makes sense on paper and the Pixels numbers back it up.
But studios have been writing checks to ad networks for years.
That's a comfortable habit, and comfortable habits don't die because someone else's retention metrics improved.
What might actually move the needle is the auditability.
Web3 studios are already used to on-chain accountability in a way traditional studios aren't. If enough of them run the numbers and see what Stacked actually costs versus what Meta costs for players who stick around versus players who don't , the math starts to look pretty embarrassing for the old model.
The players who stayed, leveled up, and built the game's economy get paid.
The ad network that served a banner to someone who forgot the game existed by Tuesday doesn't.
I don't know if this changes the whole industry. But I think it changes the conversation. And that's usually how it starts.
#pixel @Pixels #PİXEL #PİXEL $PIXEL $RONIN
Disclaimer: Includes third-party opinions. No financial advice. May include sponsored content. See T&Cs.