What is Pixels? The Social Web3 Game Built on Ronin
Tech Deep Dives

What is Pixels? The Social Web3 Game Built on Ronin

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2 months ago

A deep dive into Pixels — a social casual open-world Web3 game and platform built on the Ronin blockchain.

What is Pixels? The Social Web3 Game Built on Ronin

Table of Contents

Pixels is a social, casual, open-world Web3 game and platform. It is designed to allow users to build their own games as well as natively integrate existing digital collectibles. Pixels is built on the Ronin Network, an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) chain developed by Sky Mavis, behind the once highly popular play-to-earn game Axie Infinity.

Source: Pixels Wiki

Pixels Gameplay Using Integrated NFTs Like Pudgy Penguins

The main experience of the game revolves around gathering resources, which are divided into a variety of different types such as crops, wood, stone and more. These resources are further divided into different rarity tiers. Certain resources and rarities can only be obtained from specific types of Lands.

Source: Pixels docs

Farming is the main industry in Pixels currently. Players can grow crops on Farm Land, with Farm Land owners taking a share of all crops grown on their Farm Land. Farming requires energy which is the main constraint in the game. Energy gradually recharges over time or can be restored with food in-game.

Source: Pixels docs

With resources, players can cook food or craft valuable items such as furniture and tools. These skills require their respective blueprints or recipes to complete which can be obtained through in-game progress or events.

To top it off, players can select their own NFT as their digital avatar in-game, from a selection of more than 80 integrated NFT collections including Pudgy Penguins, Bored Ape Yacht Club, Lazy Lions, Cryptoads and many more.

Pixels In-Game Economics

The in-game economy of the game revolves around three main aspects: Land, Resources and Tokens.

Land is represented by NFTs, which are publicly tradable. Ownership of Land grants unique benefits to owners, enabling them to earn from activity on their Land and to manage their plot of Land. Owned Land also contains resources that are unavailable on public plots of Land. Land ownership however, is not a requirement to play the game and users can start for free.

Source: Opensea

Resources are the main faucet in Pixels and are the main building blocks for items in the game, through crafting or cooking. Resources will get harder to gather in amount and rarity as players progress. As such, they would have to spend more time to work their way up to gain access to higher quality resources.
BERRY is currently the primary in-game currency in Pixels and can be obtained through selling of resources gathered to the in-game store. BERRY can be used to purchase in-game items too, which serves as the primary burn mechanism. BERRY is also required to maintain plots of Land that are rented by players who do not own their own Land. However, with the upcoming release of Pixels Chapter 2, BERRY will be replaced with an off-chain token instead to prevent bots from abusing the BERRY token for profit.

Realms

Beyond their own flagship game, Pixels, the team has also developed Realms, a metaverse and blockchain game tooling enabling the creation of 2D persistent, multiplayer, virtual spaces for players to interact with.

Moreover, this also allows integration of NFTs and tokens from other projects. Realms enables other projects to integrate their Land NFTs into their metaverse, with NFT collections as in-game avatars as well. Additionally, other tokens can also be integrated to allow other projects to create their own stores and facilitate transactions in their own token.

Source: Pixels docs

Eventually, they also plan to release their own Realms Scripting Engine to further facilitate development on the platform by other projects.

PIXEL Binance Launchpool and Tokenomics

The PIXEL token is launching on 19 February in a token generation event (TGE) supported by the Binance Launchpool.

Unlike BERRY, PIXEL has a hard token cap. The relationship between BERRY and PIXEL can be thought of similar to how most mobile games operate, with a soft currency and a hard currency. Soft currencies are earned in-game through actions while hard currencies are usually acquired through payments via real-world currencies. Hard currencies are often not required for gameplay and are generally convenience improvements or cosmetic upgrades for users who acquire them.

For Pixels, the PIXEL token will be used to pay for new premium features, such as Realms, Guilds, Pets and Memberships. Additionally, the token can be used to boost energy, speed up build times, unlock new skins, and more.

Due to its hard cap, the distribution of PIXEL will be controlled more tightly than that of BERRY. PIXEL can be earned through completion of difficult tasks via their Taskboard, taxes earned by Land owners for their share of crops grown on their land, or transaction fees incurred from Guild memberships. The PIXEL supply will also be tightly managed to prevent excessive distribution, with the team experimenting and adjusting to balance the distribution and burn of PIXEL. PIXEL spent in-game will also be sent to a community treasury which will remain untouched until 12 months later, where control will be handed over to a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), to be governed by PIXEL holders.

PIXEL will have a total supply of 5 billion tokens, with 15.42%, or 771 million tokens, circulating at the TGE.

Source: Pixels docs

The bulk of the supply will be allocated to Ecosystem Rewards which will be vested linearly over five years. Investors will be subjected to a one year lockup, after which tokens will vest linearly for three years. An airdrop will also be conducted to reward eligible users from the Pixels pre-alpha in October 2022, active users in the five weeks before TGE, and BERRY token holders. These tokens form 5% of the supply and are fully unlocked at TGE.

Source: Pixels docs

What’s Next for Pixels?

To date, the team has achieved a huge milestone of over 1 million unique users and over 180K daily active users.

With the launch of the PIXEL token, the team will be experimenting carefully with the in-game economy to ensure the long-term sustainability of PIXEL. Additionally, new updates will be launched in the upcoming quarter including new explorable areas, pets, combat systems and Realms to enable player-created content in Pixels Chapter 2.

Source: Pixels docs

Pixels plans to expand on farming upgrades and automation as well as the release of the Realms Scripting Engine in the third quarter of the year, with even more planned for the final quarter.

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