@Pixels :For too long now, the gaming industry was based solely around the gamer giving up their time to the publisher without getting anything out of it. Gamers would spend countless hours playing a game, developing characters, gaining experience and collecting items only to have nothing to show for it by the time the game was done. In the end, the game belongs to the publisher. Should the publisher decide to close its doors, your progress is lost forever, while any change to the terms of agreement is made unilaterally. Such is the status quo in the gaming industry at least until the emergence of blockchain gaming. One key concept that emerged in this sphere is that gamers need to own something they earn and be able to control the games they play. However, most initial efforts in this area miserably failed. Fortunately, the whitepaper about offers an interesting take on the matter.
However, the issue with blockchain games was not blockchain technology itself. Rather, the issue was that these projects completely missed the point that blockchain games should be fun. Games such as Axie Infinity transformed into some sort of work, whereby people played not out of enjoyment but rather to obtain tokens which could then be sold. Consequently, when the price of the token started declining, people started leaving the project, and its economy collapsed along with that. This problem is explicitly acknowledged in the Pixels whitepaper which bases its concept around three pillars which are interrelated, with the first being "Fun First". The team explains that regardless of how ingenious their economic system may be, games will have to be fun and thus it is the task of the game design team to create something valuable for the users by designing an enjoyable game.
The difference of the $PIXEL framework compared to previous play-to-earn projects is its approach to rewarding players. Rather than giving tokens to everybody simply for participating, Pixels adopts an advanced data-driven framework, resembling a state-of-the-art advertising network, to detect player activity that brings long-lasting value and rewarding that player activity specifically. The reason why this is significant is that it alters the way rewards are distributed in favor of those that bring real benefits to the project. With earlier frameworks, players that relied on bots could ruin the entire economy through simple repetitive tasks. With the Pixels framework, machine learning and data analytics help determine which player actions create a positive impact on the economy, and such actions are incentivized accordingly. This is a more rational and truthful form of fairness since it rewards those that add value to the project.
The whitepaper goes on to introduce a concept known as the Publishing Flywheel. This refers to the economic principle that powers the Pixels vision. As stated above, acquiring better games leads to enhanced data from users, which in turn allows for better targeting of rewards to users, which in turn makes it cheaper to acquire users, which in turn helps to draw even better games into the ecosystem.The significance of all this lies in the fact that the more users engage with the platform, the better it becomes in every sense. For users, the benefit of this is obvious – the platform is structured such that their engagement will lead to an improvement in their own user experience. It is in this way that the user and platform form something of a partnership, one where the users’ data helps to create more games and better rewards.
It is here, in the staking system, that the argument about fairness finds its practical application. The users of the platform may choose to stake their tokens into various pools depending on the games they are playing, and the process itself serves as a voting mechanism for distributing the ecosystem resources among different games thus decentralizing the publishing process and empowering the community to have a say in which projects thrive. It represents a new level of cooperation between players and publishers. In traditional gaming, a publisher would make all decisions regarding funding and implementing certain game mechanics based on their vision, with absolutely no contribution from the users. The Pixels platform provides its stakeholders with full autonomy in determining which games deserve to be nurtured within the ecosystem. A highly popular game will enjoy more rewards and promotion due to the number of people who believe in its success, whereas an unpopular title will have nothing but criticism and negative feedback
.But there are genuine risks. Unlocks, price volatility, and player longevity are problems that still have not been solved in the Pixels ecosystem. The success of the system lies in its ability to consistently create more economic sinks than token emissions, along with decentralizing staking pools. This is no small feat. However, what sets the $PIXEL whitepaper apart from others in the blockchain gaming space is that the right questions are being asked. While other games may be built on tokens, Pixels has turned the idea of play-to-earn gaming on its head by designing a token ecosystem around a game. Through the use of data, smart incentivization, and community governance, Pixels is able to create a sustainable economy that will thrive even without hype. "Pixels was created to solve play-to-earn. It will unlock new possibilities for game expansion which will ultimately transcend Web3 and reach the mainstream audience," reads the whitepaper. Not an easy promise to keep. But at least now for once, the blockchain game industry has a design philosophy worth taking seriously.
