The rise of Ronin-based social RPG Pixels has been one of 2024’s trends we’ve covered in some depth. However, it looks as if the launch of its chapter 2 refresh in mid-June has shaken up that narrative.
Simply put, over a couple of days, Pixels’ DAUWs (as recorded by various open data sources) dropped from over 900,000 to 252,000. It’s since rebounded somewhat to 428,000.
The rise and fall looks like this.
The main point of chapter 2 has been to refocus the game’s rewards for active and high performing players, hence the presumption is that the vast majority of the drop in audience comes from removing bot accounts.
Indeed, Pixels’ CMO Heidi Christine states this, tweeting
From the series of interviews we’ve had with the Pixels team, it’s always seemed to be more concerned about players’ satisfaction than recording an abstractly high audience level (including bots). And it’s worth pointing out that many successful blockchain games have gone through a similar process.
Looking back, in mid-2022 Splinterlands made significant changes to its leaderboard reward system for exactly the same reason as Pixels: it had become too easy for bots to extract rewards so the system was rebased towards players with more expensive NFTs card collections.
The result was a similar 68% DAUWs drop over a couple of days.
Alien Worlds hasn’t experienced quite such a distinct event, but as the original tap-to-earn game, it’s been stamping on bots – adding recaptcha, rebalancing rewards etc – since 2021. During one of these efforts, it lost 43% of its DAUWs in a short period in late 2023.
To that degree then, what Pixels has just experienced is par for the course. Good developers know they have to make such adjustments if they want their game to sustain over many years.
However, for Splinterlands and Alien Worlds, the process of stamping down on bots didn’t see those games rewarded with more real players. Both games experienced steadily falling activity in 2023 and 2024 – and a lack of token price uplift – although they still remain in top 10 of games in terms of daily onchain activity. And this tension underlines the challenge that Pixels will have to overcome in the coming days.
Having a very high audience (including bots) also attracts real players. Reducing headline activity can reduce such organic marketing. Yet ensuring your game economy isn’t being extracted by bots is also crucial. Time to square the circle.