I remember the day $PIXEL reached its all-time high. Everyone was talking about it from farmers to traders to gamers. It felt like Web3 gaming had finally found something. Then I looked at the chart again a week later. I was shocked. The price was down 99%. I could not stop asking myself what exactly went wrong with PIXEL.
Let me be honest I have seen a lot of crypto projects come and go. Most of them follow a pattern that's easy to predict. First people get excited the price goes up then the community grows fast then everything just stops. However PIXEL bothers me because it actually had something to it. PIXEL is not some thing that makes big promises. It is a game that people can play a game where you can farm, explore and socialize. It is built on the Ronin Network. Real people play it every day they interact with each other inside the game. At one point PIXEL had daily players than almost any other Web3 game. That is really something. So when I see the token price so low I do not just ignore it I ask why it happened to PIXEL.
The first thing I noticed when I looked deeper into PIXEL is the way the tokens are structured. There are 5 billion PIXEL tokens in total about 15% of them are being used right now. The rest will be released slowly over time until 2029. Think about what this means for PIXEL. Every time some of these tokens are released the price of PIXEL might go down if people are not buying it. This is not a conspiracy it is how it works. It creates a problem that even good fundamentals cannot solve in the term.
Then there is the problem of having two currencies in the game, which the team is trying to fix. For a time PIXEL had two currencies: BERRY and PIXEL. BERRY was earned by playing the game and PIXEL was used for things. Having two currencies in one game is confusing it makes the value of PIXEL less clear. I think the team understood this problem, which's why they decided to use only PIXEL. This decision makes sense to me it will take time to make this change and during this time people might lose interest in PIXEL.
What I find interesting about PIXEL is the way they are doing staking. The idea is that PIXEL is not just for one game but for games that are being developed. Players can use their PIXEL tokens in games. If many games use PIXEL, the demand for it will grow in a way that one game alone cannot. This is an idea the question is, will it work in practice? There have been projects like this in Web3 that started with excitement but then failed.
I also think about how YT... affects Web3 gaming. It might seem like a thing but many people find out about new games on YouTube. If YT restricts or removes Web3 gaming content it will be hard for new games to grow. New players find games through videos if they cannot find them the number of players will decrease, if there are players the demand for PIXEL will decrease too. These are not problems on their own but they add up.
So what do I think about PIXEL now? I am genuinely not sure I think that is the way to feel about it. PIXEL is not dead the team is still working on it the game still has players they are adding features to the game like updates and guild systems and these are real developments. A 99% decline in price is not a normal change in the market it means that something needs to be changed about how the game and the token work.
The story of PIXEL is not yet over the next part of the story will need more, than a good game to make it happen.
