I spent forty minutes Tuesday trying to sell an in-game skin. Forty whole minutes. The marketplace was really slow the fee took thirty percent of my sale. By the time the transaction was confirmed the floor price had dropped anyway. I ended up with nothing and a headache. This is what most gaming economies are like.
They are designed to take from you not give to you.
It is not a Web3 problem. Traditional gaming has been doing this for a time. EA sells you loot boxes. Fortnite has a currency that only goes one way. Clash of Clans made a lot of money from making it hard for players to do things. The system is not broken by accident. It is made to take your time and money and give it to the studio. Players are not the customers they are the product.
So when I started to look at how the PIXEL token works in Pixels I felt like something was different. Not like it was going to change the world or anything just that it worked well.
The PIXEL token is not just sitting there waiting for people to speculate about it. It is a part of the game. You. You earn PIXEL. You craft things. You spend PIXEL. You complete quests. You get rewarded with PIXEL. The token is used in everything you do in the game, which means that people want it because they are playing the game not just because they think it will be worth more later.
It is like Robux. You can actually take it out of the game.. Like V-Bucks but the economy is not just a one-way street. This might sound simple. It is actually really rare. Most GameFi tokens are just added to a game so that the people making the game can raise money.
PIXEL feels like it is the economy, not something extra.
The good thing about PIXEL is that it has use in the game, which means that people will always want it. When players are using PIXEL to upgrade their things or craft items not just holding onto it to sell later that is a way for the token to work.
Pixels is built on Ronin, which makes it more interesting. The fees are low small players are not paying too much to do transactions. A player who earns five PIXEL from a quest should not have to give up four of them just to use it.
That has killed a lot of "play-to-earn" games.
I am not going to pretend that there are no risks. The big question is whether players will keep playing the game. If the game stops being fun or if the rewards get smaller to control inflation people will leave.. When players leave a game with a token-based economy it can get ugly. We have seen it before. The connection between how much players enjoy the game and the value of the token's a good thing when the market is good but it can be a problem when the market is bad.
I also want to see information about how many new PIXEL are being added to the game each month and how many are being taken out. These are not questions. They are the difference between a economy that works well and one that does not.
For now, as someone who just wants to play a game without feeling like I am being taken advantage of, the way PIXEL is designed is one of the honest attempts I have seen.
It is not perfect. It is honest.
