A couple of days ago, Ning Fan came across some data that honestly left him staring at the screen for half a minute.

Caladan released a report—can't say it's not authoritative for a market-making firm—they tracked over 3,200 GameFi projects launching between 2020 and early 2026, and the conclusion is chilling: 93% of blockchain games are effectively dead, the industry has burned through about $15 billion, and GameFi tokens have dropped an average of 95% from their 2022 highs.

Axie Infinity's daily active users plummeted from 2.8 million to 5,500, Hamster Kombat lost 96% of its users in six months, and Pixelmon raised $70 million but still hasn't launched after four years. This isn't just an 'industry pullback'; it's an all-out collapse.

But as Ning Fan scrolled through, he noticed something: @Pixels was mentioned in the Caladan report's list of "very few survivors." It wasn't being used as a negative example to be criticized, but rather highlighted as one of the "few survivors." Furthermore, in this year's active user rankings, Pixels was a very rare "post-2021" project on the list.

In that instant, Ning Fan suddenly understood one thing: Pixels never intended to follow the GameFi path from the very beginning.

Let me tell you an old story that left a deep impression on Ning Fan. Luke—the founder of Pixels—once said something very harsh during an internal debate: "If a player only plays because we can make him money, he will eventually leave because he can make more money elsewhere."

This statement basically explains the cause of the GameFi industry's demise over the past few years.

All those failed projects followed a remarkably consistent pattern: they first raised money by selling tokens and NFTs, promising a lucrative game, then poured most of their budget into user acquisition rewards. New users, lured in by the expectation of "making money," bought NFTs and tokens, only to find that once the incentives diminished, there was nothing left to do, and they left. The token price collapsed, the project team ran out of money, and the game shut down. The entire process took an average of four months.

The Caladan report calls this a "structural mismatch"—the project model is built around financial incentives, but the players want entertainment. The two are completely misaligned from the start.

Pixels does a completely different job.

To be honest, Ning Fan wasn't particularly impressed when he first saw Pixels—it was a pixelated farm game with very simple graphics. But the more he played, the more he realized something was off: the Web3 elements were deeply embedded in the game. You could experience the complete core loop of farming, cooking, and completing tasks without spending a single penny or connecting a wallet.

This reveals a fundamental logic that many projects haven't grasped: most players don't care how ingenious your tokenomics design is; they only care about how fun it is.

Caladan's report even traced a counterintuitive pattern: projects that treated Web3 as a "low-key backend engine" rather than a "scream-in-the-dark marketing selling point" actually had the highest survival rates. This perfectly explains why Pixels' data is counterintuitive. While the MIR4 army on Wemix 3.0 retreated and the Axie user base dwindled, Pixels steadily grew, currently boasting over 120,000 daily active users.

Pixels' design strategy is also clever. Instead of creating a single token and letting all free players and pure speculators vote with their feet on exchanges, it introduces a dual-token tiered model: free in-game points (Coins) are used for the most basic gameplay, and players do not need to touch the token at all; while the on-chain utility token ($PIXEL) is strictly limited to high-value actions—minting NFT avatars, creating guilds, unlocking VIP privileges, upgrading land, etc.

This tiered system is very clever. Coins isolates users from price fluctuations, so regular players are unaffected by market ups and downs, ensuring a smooth gaming experience. Meanwhile, all $PIXEL spending scenarios point to "advanced behaviors" where users genuinely want to delve deeper into the ecosystem, creating sustained real demand and eliminating the need for pure speculation to prop up the price.

The core logic of RORS isn't about "issuing a certain number of tokens and locking up a certain number of tokens," but rather "for every token issued, there must be corresponding real revenue within the ecosystem." The biggest problem with failed GameFi projects is that their revenue relies entirely on newcomers; once the growth rate of newcomers slows down, the entire economic model collapses. Pixels, on the other hand, sustains its real protocol revenue through player-initiated spending on NFT land service fees, industrial consumables, and unlocking advanced features. The Caladan report states that "survivors integrate tokens as an auxiliary layer into fun games," and Pixels is one of the cases that has best implemented this logic.

Does that mean Pixels can rest easy? Of course not.

Ning Fan isn't making empty promises. PIXEL is currently trading at $0.0075, with over 84% of the supply still locked on-chain and awaiting unlocking. Approximately 91.18 million $PIXEL tokens will be unlocked on May 19th, representing 11.83% of the circulating supply. The selling pressure is there; no one can pretend they don't see it.

But what Ning Fan wants to say is: at least the Pixels team is clear-headed. They invested resources in game content very early on—reworking Animal in January.
Care system, April launch of the Easter Rift of the Rabbits event, introduction of Tier 5 industrial upgrades, and promotion of Stacked
The AI ​​reward engine is entirely centered around "making players feel entertained, willingly spending money, and contributing real revenue to the ecosystem."

Ning Fan has seen too many blockchain game teams that start making grand promises about the metaverse before even issuing their tokens. Pixels' restraint and pragmatism are rare qualities in the Web3 community.

The Caladan report summed up GameFi's story over the past few years in one sentence: "A cautionary tale about chasing speculation rather than product-market fit." Pixels are among the few who heeded this lesson.

While people in the industry are still debating whether the price of cryptocurrencies will fluctuate by ten percent tomorrow, Pixels has already been quietly doing several things that can truly allow the project to "survive the next cycle." This is the attitude of truly confronting the problem head-on in a field where 93% of projects have failed.

Guys, do you think the GameFi industry still has a chance to recover? Or is it just hopeless? Let's chat in the comments section. #pixel