All of the Web3 games that I closely followed have met their silent grave.
Not a crash. Not a hack. Not a scandal.
Just silence.
There is a day when the Discord is in action. The following week it slows down. One month later you are speaking in front of the same 200 people who were initially in the beginning. The tourists departed without giving a notice. The grinders passed on to the next chance. What remains is a bare bone of what the project was intended to be.
I have been wondering why this is so predictable and why Pixels seems to be structurally different than most games that I have seen go silent.
The response all boils down to one factor consequences of absence.
In the majority of Web3 games, you do not pay any social price to not log in. You are missing out on some pay. Your income is decreased. But nobody takes notice that you have disappeared. No one will be operating differently due to you no longer attending. The game will go on as usual, without you.
Those are the silence problems. Absence with no consequences offers an easy way of leaving.
Chapter 3 was a change that Pixels experienced that I did not realize as fully as I did upon reflection.
Unions indicate your absence is noticeable. Your Fire must be fed. Your Union is in Bountiful a-competing. Your Yield stones are relied upon by other players. Your team will feel it should you cease appearing. Your absence bears.
It is no coincidence. That is premeditated retention design.
It is actually witty since it does not make you remain in punishment. It generates social stakes in that walking out becomes a decision with actual repercussions not only in terms of earning income, but also of those who believed that you would be there.
This is the way that the greatest old fashioned MMOs have always been. Raid groups of World of Warcraft. EVE Online corporations. Guild Wars 2 guilds. The games which had the longest retention of players were not the most rewarding games. These were where your presence was important to other people.
Pixels is attempting to bring that into a Web3 economy. The most attempt is in Chapter 3.
But here there is a strain which I do not consider to be completely overcome.
Social stakes will only succeed when the individuals surrounding you are serious to the point that they will feel your absence. There is no social pressure with a weak Union whose members are not engaged. When half your Union is already ghost-logging with just enough appearances to get rewards with no retention mechanic to do so, there are no teeth in the retention mechanic.
It is not easy to create a real sense of social commitment in an environment where players have been trained over years to extract and move out of the environment, which is filled with players. Really hard.
The question that I continue to ponder on is this: has Pixels established itself as a player base enough in the Union mechanics to establish any social stakes? Or are the larger part of Unions little more than loose bands of players, which will disperse the instant that the rewards become thin?
I do not have a pure answer. What I do know is that this is the correct issue that we are attempting to resolve.
Since not all games that pass through the silence stage have the most successful tokenomics.
They are the ones in which it feels like you are turning up to something important by logging in.
Does your Union make you feel that you are important? Or is it like an additional reward system?