Can Play-to-Earn Ever Be Sustainable?

In this episode of the Naavik Gaming podcast, host Niko Vuori welcomes back Luke Barwikowski, founder and CEO of Pixels.xyz, to discuss whether Play-to-Earn mechanics can, in fact, be sustainable. 

Luke shares the evolution of Pixels, its unique approach to Play-to-Earn gaming, and the strategies that have led to significant user growth (10 million registered users) and revenue generation (over $20 million in the past 12 months). The conversation delves into the sustainability of Play-to-Earn models, the importance of data-driven decision-making in game monetization, and the future plans for expanding the Pixels ecosystem. 

Luke also shares insights into the current state of web3 player demographics and geographic player concentration, the monetization strategies being employed, and the role of DAOs in shaping the future of gaming.

We’d also like to thank Overwolf for making this episode possible! Whether you're a gamer, creator, or game studio, Overwolf is the ultimate destination for integrating UGC in games! You can check out all Overwolf has to offer at https://www.overwolf.com/.

This transcript is machine-generated, and we apologize for any errors.

Niko: Hello, and welcome to the Naavik gaming podcast. I'm your host, Niko Vuori. In today's episode, we are diving once again into the world of web3 gaming, which really looks to be back in a big way in 2025.

We also have a returning guest on the show. He is the founder and CEO of Pixels.xyz, Luke Barwikowski. He was on the pod almost exactly a year ago in an episode titled play-to-earn his dead. Long live play-to-earn and it covered what at the time appeared to be some green shoots rising from amidst oxy infinities smoking ashes Pixels.xyz had a different approach to play to earn and Luke, at the time, claimed it was a more sustainable one and, of course, color me a little skeptical, we covered that but it sounded promising so then fast forward to almost exactly a year from that, and Luke is back to tell us whether Pixels.xyz approach to play-to-earn truly is more sustainable.

But this time, his words are backed by some pretty legit numbers. Over 10 million registered players, over 20 million in 2024 revenue and growing, and he has a very reasonable claim to the number one title in web3 gaming. Pixels is blending farming, exploration, and community driven events in ways that appear to be working.

They even hosted what's so cool and what's been called the first ever web3 wedding, which I was reading about in a lot of detail. I hadn't heard about it, and it's just truly awesome. So we're gonna spend a little time talking about that, too, They pulled in thousands of players concurrently to the celebration of the wedding in game.

Without further ado, here to discuss how Pixels reached these milestones and what's next for its evolving ecosystem is Luke Barwikowski, founder and CEO of Pixels.xyz. Luke, welcome back to the pod. It's great to have you here.

Luke: Yeah, no, thanks so much for having me. I've always been a big fan of Naavik.

I was getting a report sent to me monthly when you guys were doing that. Yeah, I love your breakdowns and I am super happy and honored to be here.

Niko: Awesome. Well, we're honored to have you back on. Thank you for the kind words. Yeah, the Naavik team do some great work. So little play out for Naavik here.

If you're a game developer or you're interested in the space, go and subscribe. The newsletters are free these days. A lot of the breakdowns are absolutely fantastic. And we've had a lot of founders of companies come to us and say, Hey, how did you even know about all these things like this information is in public?

So yeah, our analysts do a fantastic job Nice plug up for Naavik here. All right. Well, without further ado then, let's get into the actual episode itself. So Luke, I know you're a return guest, but I don't expect all of our listeners to recall your background from a year ago. So why don't you give us a quick recap of who you are, where you came from, your journey into web3 gaming, and the Pixels.xyz founding story.

Luke: Yeah, totally. My name is Luke. I'm the founder and CEO of Pixels. And I was kind of an outsider to both web3 and gaming before I started Pixels. My background is more of like the scrappy startup founder background where truthfully I probably started the startup a little bit too young.

I started basically a year after college. I went to college for economics and computer science and I had a really early coding background too. I started coding when I was like 12 years old, and if I had to kind of, you know, say what my strengths were as an early stage founder was more on the technical side and on building stuff really quickly.

It took me a little bit of time to even like break into like a normal startup world, you know. I started what became Pixels in 2020 when I was living in New Zealand and Pixels actually didn't start as a web3 game. It started as a virtual spaces and events company, kind of competing with Gather Town.

And It's funny because that was kind of like metaverse, but web2 version, the metaverse at the time. That company didn't really end up working out to really, really tough business to build in that industry. What we found in the virtual event space was that you're struggling with some of the things that these companies are still building and there are struggling with still retention, engagement, especially post-COVID like what we found is after COVID people didn't really want to actually hang out in virtual events or, you know, use that as an alternative to zoom or, you know, actually IRL events. But yeah, eventually we kind of found our way into web3. I was initially attracted to web3 gaming, even though I didn't have a gaming background because I love economics.

And to me, that actually was like pretty good founder market fit. I studied economics, not because I thought it was going to be useful in the real world or to any of my jobs. I just really, really liked it and enjoyed it. And the idea of virtual nation building was a really big narrative when we pivoted into web3 gaming.

That's when Axie was kind of in its come up. And to me it was just the coolest thing. I was like, okay, I'm building anything that sounds awesome, and I at least want to give a go at it. So we basically took a very counter traditional approach to building inside the gaming and web3 because I came from the startup background I came from brute forcing product market fit beforehand and we chose to build in public rather than the traditional style of building a game where, you know, you take a couple of years to develop it, you get it perfect and you release it. Instead, we released a really bad game in 2021, and we've been updating it kind of on the weekly cadence. You know, pace has changed a little bit now that we have more users, but for the first two years, there were weekly updates. I think we did like 102 public releases in a two year span. The game got gradually better and better, and that speed of iteration really helped us figure out some of the key truths that I believe in web3 gaming, at least.

One of the big things is kind of figuring out who the audience is, you know, what actually works and what doesn't. When we came into web3 gaming, there was a lot of theory crafting at the time, but not a lot of people that were actually building and releasing stuff. And it turns out a lot of those early theories were quite wrong, at least in our opinion.

I mean, what we've seen is s lot of the people who were funded in 2021 aren't even around anymore, to be completely honest. And instead we took the approach of saying, hey, we don't really know what's going to work inside of web3 gaming. Like, let's just build with our users, see what is sticking and what's not.

We've tried a lot of things that haven't worked. We've seen some things that are working now, and we've kind of honed in on a few key points. So what we've seen with web3 gaming is I think that any web3 game turns into play-to-earn, whether you like it or not. If you have an on chain asset that has open economy, open market, people are going to optimize their gameplay around getting these assets.

Even MMOs, you see this gameplay a lot. Most MMOs like RuneScape, World of Warcraft, they are kind of play to earn. So we think it's a reality of web3 gaming. Now, when you have a web3 game and a play-to-earn game, you also have a lot of people that want to break everything inside of that game.

There's the theoretical side of web3 gaming. And then there's also the practical side. Um, and the practical side is the things like law prevention, the detection, things like smart rewards and reward targeting that we're doing. And what we've been working on are a few systems. We're really bullish on this idea of play-to-earn and this metric called return on reward spend.

We see play-to-earn as a potential alternative to traditional gaming user acquisition. And to us, that's really the meat of play-to-earn gaming. So yeah, that's kind of what we've been working on, my background and how we've gotten here. And yeah, it's been a counter narrative approach, but so far it's worked for us.

Niko: Nice. Well, there's a lot to unpack there. Thanks for the background there. What one of the things that I, so what's nice about what you just said there is it seems like you've been sticking the course over the last year, right? So, you know, your background was you started in early, you know, early web3 2021, iterated things, you know, may or may not have worked great.

But last year when you came on the pod, you were like, hey, we think we're onto something, we're leaning into play-to-earn. It was not actually that popular at the time. Like everybody's leaning out of play-to-earn. Right? And you were like, no, you know, I'm one of the few people who believes in this. I have this thesis and it was still very early then, right? You hadn't proven anything out. It was more just like we have this idea you were featured in the New York Times as well. I think that was after the worry. Did you know that?

Luke: Yeah.

Niko: Yeah, there was something there. I mean, because I hope you clipped it like put it up in your office or something like it was that happened after you were on the pod.

And it was like, hey, I know that guy like he's in the New York Times. They're covering, you know, crypto gaming in the Philippines. I think there was in Vietnam. They were covering a lot of that. So it was interesting to see that. You were very early back, I guess, into the web3 play-to-earn space and then have been recognized over the last year or so as one of the pioneers essentially of doing this kind of wave two of web3 gaming.

So, congratulations, by the way, on that. And I really do hope you clipped it. Cause that's kind of a cool thing to be in the New York Times.

Luke: Yeah, no, I appreciate it. I mean, yeah, so one of the realities is Pixels was not the web3 game that people wanted to be like the flagship leader, and it's cool to see some of the validation that some of the stuff that we're doing has actually attracted real people, real users and real spend, and that's kind of what I think builds a successful company.

You gotta do the things that people don't expect, because, I mean, there are some, there are some interesting things we've uncovered as we've done this, basically. And because of that, you know, it's nice to get some of the recognition that we're moving the space in some aspects. I mean, I think people also forget because web3 gaming and even the last year has actually come a long way.

It's still not figured out yet. We haven't solved everything yet either. But if you remember a year ago, or even like a little bit more than a year ago, there were deep questions on if there were even anybody, any gamers in we3, if anybody was interested and that in there, that is not the case anymore.

There were some reports, I think even maybe Naavik posted them. Maybe that's how I found out that there were like only.

Niko: Oh yeah, quick plug here. Yeah, we, so we partnered with Game Seven, our very own Devin Becker, who joins me occasionally on the pod to talk about all things web3. We partnered with Game Seven to produce this kind of state of web3 gaming report towards the end of last year, pretty recent.

And we actually had an episode with Devin, and I had a separate episode with George from Game Seven to cover that. So listeners, if you're interested in, in the web3 ecosystem, absolutely go and check it out. It's on our website, easily accessible, or it's on the Game Seven website as well. Lots of juicy details around web3 adoption, gaming community, the gamers themselves, the state of the different chains, the L twos, the L threes, lots of juicy stuff there for you guys to unpack. So yeah, I'm glad you read it.

Luke: Yeah, I mean, so the narrative used to be that there were no web3 gamers at all, right?

Niko: That's right.

Luke: Um, and now that's not the case. So now there's more questions of like, who's gonna grab the attention? Like who's building out something sustainable, all this kind of stuff. So the space has moved a lot, right? Which is great, and yeah, I'm glad they have played a part of that.

Niko: Awesome. All right. Well, there's a lot to unpack. Like I said, we've got some acronyms again.

We've got some new ones here. You got R. O. R. S. Which is something we didn't talk about last year, or at least I don't recall it wasn't in the transcript of the episode, which I did go over. So that's some cool stuff there. But let's start a little bit with some of these headline numbers here, which is you've put out there that you generated 20 million plus in revenue for 2024 fiscal.

You've reached, you say, a market cap of 160 million. Curious to hear how you calculate that you have 10 million registered players. That's legit. So, what are the drivers of this? And what are these 10 million players all doing in order for you to generate some of this revenue?

Luke: Yeah. So our monetization thesis is our game on the monetization side monetizes a lot more like a free-to-play game than maybe what you've seen in web3 gaming before.

One thing I was really cautious of when we were building out the economics here was I didn't want any Ponzi style mechanics inside of the game. Or we really don't even really have any DeFi mechanics inside of the game either. Like, there's still no staking in the pixel ecosystem. There's no, like, concept of APR.

There's none of that inside of the game right now. All the monetization inside the game is driven through live op events. It's driven through in game purchases that kind of enhance gameplay. Or, like unlock more playtime, like you would see in a free-to-play game. And then also through subscriptions or like, kind of like premium battle passes, which was a thing in our last, um, you know, talk on Appic as well.

 But yeah, when we calculate revenue, what we're calculating is basically, we denominate it in US dollars. Because what we've seen is, you know, as token price fluctuates, there's still kind of that constant U. S. demand, uh, U. S. dollar demand when you're making purchasing decision, like the reality is U. S. dollar is still kind of the currency of the world and people make decisions based on like U. S. dollar prices of an in game asset, even if we did nominate it in the pixel token. Now, what we've been focused on when we think about our economics is still like the nominal economics. So we still think about monetization internally when it comes to like pixel spend versus pixel out.

And that's kind of what we're trying to optimize and fix with return on reward spend. But the reality is our performance on the monetization side is best nominated in U.S. dollars because, you know, regardless of token price, you know, what you see is like basically how the game is performing is the nominated in that now, when we think about.

How we are growing the game? We have a different model than traditional, you know, web2 games or really any game. We have not spent a single dollar on advertising on Facebook, Google, Instagram ads, nothing like that, which is really counterproductive or counter narrative to the traditional way that games grow.

Like the fact that we've been able to get 10 million users on 0 of ad spend is still quite notable. And you know, when we were telling people this in the early days, you know, I don't think they really understood. I feel like last year, when we went to GDC and we were kind of mixing with, you know, the web2 game founders, CEOs, I started telling them these stats, you know, we've gotten, I think we're at like 5 million registered users then, 0 of ad spend.

That's when their ears started perking up. So the way that we do that is we have a token, right? And we distribute some of that token as rewards inside of the game. Now you can earn the token through a couple different mechanisms right now inside of core pixels. The first game that we released, you can earn it mostly through this mechanic called task board.

It's an in game feature where basically we give you daily missions inside of the game and you go and complete certain tasks to get potentially reward or potentially other in game rewards of the pixel token. Now, we didn't nominate any pixel that we give out as a reward as kind of like user acquisition spend in our modeling when we think about how well we're doing now, our goal is basically in the longer on what we want to do is we want to give out less pixel and people are spending and that's where the data science and this metric called return on reward spend is quite important.

So right now we're not at a positive return on reward spend. We're still taking a loss when it comes to reward spend, but that reward spend has been increasing month by month, and that's kind of the whole puzzle that we're trying to figure out. And the thesis here is there are actually certain users, just like in a free-to-play game, in our game, that monetize quite well, actually.

Like ARPPU, with some of these users in web3 can be quite high, despite some of the weaknesses of our game right now. Like if I'm analyzing weaknesses inside of our game, I think our depth of spend is not really where it needs to be yet. It's augmented by some other ecosystem stuff that we're doing, but we're still optimizing some of the like traditional web2 metrics to improve this number. The other side of the equation when it comes to reward distribution is kind of like you're running ads, but you're running them internally. So there's two sides of the equation that we're working on, right?

It's monetization, basically improving game quality, making it as fun as possible. Increasing traditional web2 metrics, like Depth of Spend, ARPU, ARPU, all of this kind of stuff, and the other side is making sure that you're giving out rewards to the right people that might have them spend even more inside of the game as well, too.

When we think about reward spend or reward distribution, there's two things that kind of happened there. One, you're massively boosting retention when you start to get out rewards inside the game. At first, when we were talking to people, people were like, your metrics don't count because you're giving out rewards.

And I think you can kind of like, you know, left curve it and say that, yes but also the metrics are there, right? It's kind of obvious, right? When you give out rewards to people inside of a game, they're probably going to stay a bit longer, but is that a bad thing? We say no. We say that we can actually take advantage of that now there's so much nuance when you start to dig into the reward distribution side of things. You know, the systems that we have to actually distribute rewards. Right now we're starting to shift towards data driven approaches towards reward distribution. So a lot of work we've been doing. Is on the data science side over the last six months.

And we're kind of building out systems that a lot of the big web2 companies have when they build out things like offer systems or monetization optimization. We're doing a lot of segmentation work. So we've been doing is, and we're so lucky to have this with the amount of users that we have is we're almost kind of farming data as we're taking in this loss right now, where we can kind of analyze what users do when we give them rewards with these rewards.

Are they immediately, you know, selling them on an open market? Are they using them inside of the game? Is this increasing the metrics that we need to actually convert some of these users into like the whale class or the high spender class. And this is kind of the work that we're working on now. So the return on reward spend, there's two sides you have to look at, like, is the game good and are you efficiently distributing rewards?

There's a few things that we've done that have massively improved this. One is our bot prevention detection. That's the first step that you want to increase this metric if you have any MMO, any web3 game. I think a lot of people are naive on this sometimes. It will get botted and it will be attacked.

And you have to plan around that. So there's a few things that you can do. Some of the game systems that you build have to kind of have this in mind. But there's also the data science too. So, a lot of what we've been working on is the basically data driven approach to bot identification. And it's interesting because in web3, it's a little bit easier to classify because the goal of a bot is kind of simple in a web3 game.

Their goal is to attack your game and make money, so when we start to label users and start to do all the segmentation and tagging, we can pretty clearly see, regardless of anything else, the users that are like earning a little bit too much money. Right? And as we're going to start to roll out some of this smart reward distribution, that's what we're going to start to take a pretty clear look at, right?

We're kind of labeling users into like five or six buckets right now on how we want to start to distribute rewards, but it can get way more nuanced, just like the, I take Scopely is a great example of somebody who's like kind of nailed down their user segmentation. We've even been hiring from Scopely a lot lately to kind of help with this is, they basically take a look at like all their classes of users.

They have tons of different segments. Zynga is quite good at this too. And they're able to kind of give offers to the right people at the right time. And they're able to give retention incentives too. I view rewards the same way. Where we can start to target these even smarter than we are right now, kind of nerf the rewards to the people who we know are extracting maximum value, start to get more rewards to players who are on the right pathway to becoming, you know, better spenders and better like ecosystem players and like boost rewards, even for like, here's a really interesting thing we're doing, we're even able to boost rewards for our at risk classes.

So for example, we know user’s about to churn. Yeah? And we know that they're on a good pathway towards monetization. We might even want to increase their incentive to stay slightly, right? So yeah, that's kind of the core of what we're doing here. So yeah, we were able to generate over 20 million of revenue, denominated in U.S. dollars.

What that's looked like is, you know, we have the stats posted publicly, but, you know, we basically give out, you know, about 22, 24 million pixel a month and ecosystem rewards and we're getting about 11 million back. Now this month looks a little bit a little bit healthier too, because we have some other ecosystem projects joining.

But yeah, that's kind of the high level basically. So the goal is to essentially get this reward ratio up and up every single month. We're making really good progress on that. And yeah, this is kind of the way that we're tackling this problem.

Niko: All right. So lots of unpack there as well. I think one of the things that struck me the most as you were talking is, and don't take this wrong way, take this the right way, this is a compliment, is like this isn't actually rocket science. Like this is something that web2 gaming has figured out a long time ago, right? Which is this data driven approach. You know, I'm ex-Zynga. I will bore my listeners every time we have an episode with some anecdote from Zynga. Great opportunity to do so right here as well.

You know, Zynga was one of the pioneers of the data driven game product management and data science disciplines. And what you're describing then Scopely, of course, is taking it to new levels, exceptional new levels. What you're describing there is, is not rocket science in the sense that it's best practices for trying to understand your, your player base, right, which is find the right incentives, the right moments, which will, you know, trigger a user to either spend more or retain better or whatever the metric is you're trying to move. And so what's interesting is that that didn't hold true for a really long time in web3. It was like there was this magical thinking where it's like, just because it's on chain, like it's magically gonna do better and it's not true, right? Like it just didn't, that hasn't worked.

That is for sure not gonna work and hasn't proved been proven to work. But I think what you're describing there is just, you know, it's a really nice live ops type mode that you guys have gotten into. Now I will say 11 million pixels versus 22, 24 million pixels. I don't like those margins very much.

So, so let's talk about that a little bit because, yes, you're describing essentially user acquisition, which is a huge percentage of other studios, web two studios budget, but when they're taking in revenue, they get to keep all of that, right? Whereas yours is in first thing pixels. And so you're, you know, obviously doing the conversion there to 20 million.

I don't know how volatile I didn't actually check the chart. Probably should have, but I don't know how volatile pixels has been over time. And so that's one thing, right? It's not 20 million. It's not necessarily worth 20 million today. You know, it may have been worth that now token prices are going up.

So you know, you're probably on the right trajectory there. So that's question number one. And then number two is that margin, right? Like 11 million pixels in, 24 million pixels out. I'm not a mathematician, but yeah. I think that doesn't back out to profit anytime. So yeah, not yet. So, so I just want to dig on that a little bit further because if we're going to talk about sustainability and you know, I need to be intellectually honest with our listeners that is currently not sustainable.

So let's dig into that a little bit further. How are you making it sustainable? You're saying it's getting better each month. What, what do you need to do in order to make it so that it's not an extractive ecosystem? It's, you know, an additive one.

Luke: Yeah, so there's a few things. So one, basically this model is kind of accepting that in web2, when you're modeling LTV per user and by segment, by cohort, you stop at zero LTV, right?

What you're kind of saying here is like, no, negative LTV is actually acceptable. Um, so you're kind of shifting the LTV model a little bit here, but then that's kind of how the math works. Now, the weaknesses inside of our ecosystem right now is we actually didn't really have the right pieces to monetize the game properly.

Like if you actually play pixels right now, we really only had the right team to do it starting in like July, to be completely honest, we started hiring better talent, better people on the team that were able to like bring in their experience from Web 2 to do this. And you've seen big increases in monetization since then.

You know, in August, the return on reward spend was more like 0. 28. So we've increased it quite a bit. We've increased the ARPU by about like 400 percent since that same time too. So one core pixel game quality just needs to increase. You know, it wasn't there at the time if I'm being honest. And now we're on a better track to do that.

The other thing too is basically we didn't start implementing the smart rewards until this month, so I'm really excited to see how that actually goes into effect. But it's clear the better that we get at bot prevention detection and the smart reward distribution, we've seen noticeable uplift in these metrics like return on reward spend and ARPU as well. So, you know, the bet that we're making is basically we're taking a loss just like a normal startup would, you know, when you go and build a new startup, you raise money, you normally kind of take a loss in the beginning stages. It's the same concept here, right? So if we're not on a trajectory to get to sustainability.

That's a big issue, but I'm not seeing return on reward spend increase month on month, and there's no track to get there. Yeah, pixels will never be sustainable. And this is a bad thesis, and it's not going to work basically, but that's the bet that we're making as a team, right? Like we want to get there.

We think we can. It's actually, to me, it seems pretty clear that there is a path there at some point, and we're even seeing it. Like one thing we haven't touched on in this call yet is, you know, we started expanding the ecosystem a little bit. We're kind of doing some publishing acquisition models right now, because one of the weaknesses that we saw in our ecosystem is four pixels.

We love it, it had a lot of work to do basically to get to the level it needed to with um, like feature parody towards web2 games and monetization towards web2 games, too That's improving month on month. It's looking a lot better than it was six months ago. But we can also really expand and like speed up this process through strategic acquisitions and publishing deals.

We did our first at the end of December. We published, or like semi acquired a game called Pixel Dungeons. It was one of the leading games on Tyco. Beforehand, and they joined the pixel ecosystem. So what that deal looks like basically is they monetize using the pixel token and we give them some pixel every single month for user acquisition as well.

And they actually have a significantly better return on reward spend in that game than in core pixels. that game can be profitable if we want it to be. First two weeks of that game was Profitable. I think it made something like 200, 000 us dollars in revenue in the first two weeks pure profit how that game works is basically you go into these dungeons, you're able to mine some pixel, and that game takes a little bit of a rake, from Players when they go in and do it so it's played to earn but it's more like risk to earn in a way that game. And some of the cool stuff that we're doing there is we're starting to activate our users inside of core pixels, send it to that game because it's actually a much more efficient use of reward spend there.

We started to amp up some of the user acquisition there and we're taking like some acceptable loss there right now but that return on reward spend is sitting at about 0. 9 in that game right now and that's where things start to get interesting So that model is already looking way better when you have a game that can monetize better as well say, and we're starting to look at that stuff, too. We have a couple of other games that we're releasing that we're a lot more confident on when it comes to monetization off the bat. We have a pet companion app coming, that's going to really mimic Sushar Pengu, and I'm quite excited about what that's going to do.

But yeah, I think if you start looking at the broader ecosystem too, you're going to see like even more promise inside of this model. And yeah, we're working with that team to basically even target some. Fix or a core pixels users and send them to different places. So yeah, that's, that's kind of the thought process there.

Niko: Got it. Okay. Related question. Remind me if you've raised any outside funding. And if not, how are you guys, managing your cashflow? I mean, you mentioned you're hiring some folks from Scopely. They're not cheap. I know that. So, how are you guys funded at the moment? And how are you making sure that you keep the lights on?

Luke: Yeah. So we raised venture capital.

Niko: Oh, yeah. Okay. That went under the radar. Then when did that happen?

Luke: Yeah. Before the token launch, foundation raised some venture capital and then, like opco raised in venture capital too. So yeah, that's kind of the business model right now. Like our focus is really on token revenue rather than U.S. dollar revenue.

And until we get to token profitability, I'm not really interested as much in other forms of revenue before the token to be able to build up like a decent cash reserve. We were selling our in game VIP passes in the Ronin token, for example, we're able to build a pretty nice cash position that way.

That was not our token. So yeah, basically we can kind of just focus on building out token profitability without worrying too much about that. We were talking about five year plan. Yeah, we kind of need to focus on other revenue besides that as well, too, because when you're thinking about, you know, token inflows, outflows, like eventually this company needs to build profit in forms other than the token, or the company would basically have to sell token, in order to sustain the lights.

Well, I'll say this team is pretty lean and pretty capital efficient. I would bet that our like operating cost, compared to anybody else's. Similar market cap or size is like 10x lower. We don't need a huge team to do what we're doing. We have the right people in the right spots now and my approach has always been keep the team lean maybe to a fault. Sometimes I think I should have maybe hired a little bit earlier after our token launch so we wouldn't have to wait six months to get the right people for monetization and all these other things but you know you live and you learn, and yeah, we can just kind of focus on the core mission statement and making play to earn work in the short term, right?

Now there are other interesting revenue models. Once we figure out play-to-earn, it's not interesting right now until we kind of solve these fundamentals. But I am super interested in the idea of opening up more of this tech that we have to other teams once we solve this return on reward spend problem.

So basically what we're doing right now is we already have two games where we're doing this data science segmentation and like reward optimization, right? And we're building all the tech that we have to be generalizable. Like, that's always my engineering approach, right? When we build something, I want to make sure that it's able to be used by other people and able to be used in a very simple way in the team.

So some of the tech that we're working on right now. It's basically, it's almost like ad tech, it's internally focused right now, and it's built towards like our own designers to be able to use it. So what I don't want is I don't want to have a data scientist have to go in and like figure out, okay, who do we give this reward to, who do we give like, what segment do we get this reward to?

I want to be really clear for anybody in the team to understand. We have a campaign internally. Basically, we set aside a certain amount of rewards for different segments. Reward spend for that particular segment?

And, um, we're basically building out tools that are really easy for internal teams to do that. And eventually opening that tech up to other teams. We have that positive return on reward spend proved in our own team gets interesting. So a good example is when we have this figured out. It makes sense for other teams to want to use this too.

We can start to build revenue streams of other tokens potentially when we have that opened up, so for example, if we help another team distribute their tokens through some platform that we have basically they come in they want to run a campaign saying to their own users saying hey, I want to give out this many rewards to my highest spenders We can take break on their tokens , and what's interesting too is This doesn't have to be in token when we figure this out to what's nice is basically with this model that we're doing right now.

And why web three made sense for this play to earn model is if we want to do this in web two, we probably could have. The only thing is if I wanted to go experiment the same amount of user acquisition power that we have every single month inside of web2, I would have had to raise 100 million in fiat. Right? And there are probably some founders in Web 2 that could have gone and done that. That's just not our route. Right? So we get all this experimentation. On the user acquisition side to be able to do this at scale that's, you know, a web two team would have had to raise so much money for and that's the interesting part and why it's kind of for me acceptable or acceptable for us to take like a slight loss on token profitability for now and make direction towards that. So that's kind of the bet that we're making.

We're going to solve play to earn and hopefully open it up to other teams to build out revenue streams that way. And then, yeah, an interesting thing on the profitability note is if you start looking at other, literally every other web three company, I'm not just talking about games, but infrastructure, chains, any of that, we're actually much more profitable, even though we're taking a big loss than most other major projects, there's not really any that are profitable right now, he did it at one point, right, they were able to manage some of their staking emissions, With, like token inflows and fees, but if you take a look at Solana, right, like I would encourage you to start looking into like some of these like large web3 companies on their net outflows. They're crazy, actually so.

Niko: Yeah, well, I mean, they've got some Trump coin now and they've got some Melania coin. So they got that going for them. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. I mean, I think the biggest takeaway for me from this is that what you just described is that, you know, nobody in web3 still has hasn't figured out.

You're on the path, but they still haven't got to figure it out. So I think I think a phrase you just put out there was we're going to solve play-to-earn or we're going to figure out play-to-earn, still hasn't been figured out, I think. I'm curious to hear, you know, you got 10 million registered players are going to shift now a little bit from the revenue model, which I think we understand.

I think our listeners understand quite well now, based on what you described, and you've actually answered a lot of the questions I had coming up as part of your answers here, I want to talk a little bit about the players now. So you got 10 million registered players. Who are these people? And where are they coming from?

I believe a year ago, and when we talked about your, your player base and distribution, it was your kind of records traditional web3 environments like the Philippines, Vietnam, places like that, where I believe the New York Times article again came out just a little bit after you were on the pod last time, had photos of folks in Internet cafes in places like Vietnam and the Philippines, which, of course, was the original Axie Infinity audience right for play-to-earn appears to hear. Is that still true for you and Pixels?

And what is your vision for? I'm presuming you would like to broaden that out because you're gonna have trouble finding gaming whales who are truly there for the joy of the game in some of these lower income regions where folks are going to internet cafes purely to mine harvest. You know, earn some token.

So your thoughts on your player base and some expounding upon who they are and where do you believe you have the biggest bang for the buck in terms of acquiring, and again, you're not doing traditional acquisition, user acquisition. I'm using air quotes here for our non YouTube listeners. You know, you're not doing user acquisition in the traditional sense, but obviously by giving out rewards, that is user acquisition.

That's very effective word of mouth among communities who are like, Oh, okay, I can go earn some token here. So, talk about your players.

Luke: Yeah. So it's interesting because like transparently, this is also some like insights to anybody doing like demographic research into web3 gaming. It's getting harder to do that in games and web3 gaming in particular, because, because of the problem inside of web3 gaming, users have gotten quite good at masking some of the demographic data and faking and spoofing it.

So note that, like if you were to look at our demographic data, traffic data, all of that, it would look like our number one country is the U S right now. That's cause a lot of people are VPNing in from the U S but also when we start to analyze our spend behavior, regardless of that, um, so it's hard to get like the general player based demographics.

You can still see that high amount of spend comes from U.S., China, Japan, Korea, you know, all the demographics you would typically expect in free to play gaming. There's nothing really that changes in web3 gaming with that. But yeah, you're also, if you see a lot of US traffic in any web3 game, just note that VPN might be because of the broader demographic. Besides that people that don't hide through VPNs We see a large amount of like the free to play player base still based in Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia. And there are a lot of casual players that still play in the U.S. as well regardless of VPN masking, but yeah, typical spenders tend to be there.

Our ideal player and what we've seen with spend profile is really lining up with where we would expect to see it in free to play. It is like the 25 to like 45 year old like, you know, working like mom, or like, you know, male that has like professional career. Basically it's a lot of the web3 enthusiasts that tend to spend the most inside of the game.

Right? It's not surprising, right? It's the same kind of people that we normally ape into in an NFT collection, or like, participate in any web3 eco that we see the highest spend, and that's still kind of like when we're whale hunting, what we're thinking about, basically, so there's, there's a few different demographics that we think about when we're thinking about who we want to attract inside the game when it comes to monetization.

And who we want to attract when we think about broader ecosystem initiatives that we have. So one thing that we don't have right now is staking, for example. And that actually is something that we're going to start to introduce. I don't want to go too much into the details right now since we're still trying to clear some of the stuff behind legal and feasibility.

But that is coming because I think there is finally a place for it, when it comes to our ecosystem. And when we think about those user, like who we're targeting there, still lowest hanging fruit that we really haven't tapped into is. You know, some of the web three enthusiasts, like why not target them, these web3 enthusiasts?

I think some people get it wrong. They are gamers too. Most of the time, like most of the time that people think about these web3 people, they just label them as DGN. But these are DGNs that grew up playing MMOs and believe in virtual economy and like playing this kind of stuff typically.

Yeah, we're also about to make more of a casual push too. I think one area that's been really underexposed inside of web three gaming is consumer social and consumer casual, that's kind of the initiative that we have with this upcoming Pet app that we are going to be doing this is going to monetize way more like a free to play game.

It's going to have Most of the like free to play social features that you have. I'm excited about this one. So yeah, basically I don't think monetization, like who you target looks too different than the web2 demographics kind of line up when we think about like ideal customer in the similar web2 demographics and a lot of it is like filtering and making sure that you actually have the right stuff through all this fake data that you get pushed inside of web3 gaming.

Niko: Yeah, so if I were to recap, you know the mass of the market of the 10 million is coming from Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, and those players are there mostly to earn, I'll be it. I'm sure they're, you know, percentage of them are playing and then in terms of the monetization, the whale hunting is happening in the kind of the Web three ecosystem.

Now, I think if I were to yeah, challenge that just a little bit, you know, yes, all free to play games are heavily reliant on whales in web two, but the ocean in which you're doing your whale hunting is much, much bigger than if you're doing your whale hunting in the web three waters, right? To, to use that whale hunting analogy here.

So I'm curious to hear your thoughts on whether that. Obviously the pockets can be very, very deep in crypto, right? And if you've got some crypto whales, they can drop way more than even the biggest spenders in, in web two. So I understand. And I think our listeners appreciate how orders of magnitude apart those can be on an individual user basis, but I do want to hear your thoughts on whether that pool is big enough longer term to sustain. This return on reward spend ratio that you're talking about because you will be heavily reliant on these web three. I still call them degens. I think it's okay. I think it's a term. Okay, these web3 degens, if you're going to rely on that, you know, you really are relying on essentially massive spenders as opposed to, you know, big spenders in web2.

Luke: Yeah, well, what's interesting right now is we haven't been relying on that yet. So there's 100, 000 monthly active spenders inside of pixels right now.

And the depth of spend that you could even possibly spend in pixels is really shallow. There's really not much to spend on besides a subscription that is like 30 bucks, about 10 bucks a month and like some in game coin purchasing too. So there is kind of a fault in core pixels right now with that pixel dungeons has done much better at that.

They have a much better depth of spend and I think that's why the return on reward spend is looking better than core pixels right now. But yeah, I mean, when we think about living in fruit for four pixels, that's kind of what I'm thinking in the early stages, but I would agree like right now are like bread and butter has actually been getting like those one to 10 purchases, which has been great.

And that's comfortable enough, even for like players in Philippines and Vietnam. That's kind of topping out, like for them purchasing, you know, a VIP subscription, it's kind of a big deal, and you'll even see like sometimes guild systems form with this for like whales to help their like friends or like their guilds, even get this too.

Like one of the things that we started experimenting with was feature in pixels called field wars. There's been some interesting behavior with that, where there are these whales who are kind of like Playing this metagame of managing a guild, and helping basically these, you know, free to play players from like some of the lower income countries like level up and do all this stuff.

I like that. It's different than the Axie guilds. This has been like a bit more of a friendly guild system, basically. That's like a little bit, I don't know. Axie is in a much different spot than it was two or three years ago. I think people, when you talk about Axie, need to understand that. Previous Axie, even the Axie team knows that like some stuff with that was not right. Currently Axie is in, I think, actually a pretty good spot. But yeah, previous Axie guilds, I think, turned a little exploitative. These ones are a bit different. This is all centered around gameplay. And yeah, cooperation, which is a bit better. We encourage people to dive into our system there, it's kind of cool.

But yeah, with agree though, we do need to start targeting these other audiences. So the key thing here that we're working on also is you play pixels right now. First time user experience is quite bad. It's getting better and this is where we literally just hired somebody full-time to come in and fix this for us.

We have a bunch of extra escapee devs on our team now, which is great too. I mean, that's to me one of the coolest things. But yeah, we got. Somebody was doing data science and front end optimization, onboarding optimization from RuneScape to come in and help us like redo our FTUE to make it friendlier to people who are not crypto friendly, basically.

So yeah, there's some work that needs to get done there. I would say with our Q1 goals, that's probably the biggest thing. We're starting to, we're going to start to go back into a growth stage. We've been focused on for the last six months is kind of like optimizing the game fixing game economy game economy kind of broke with these changes around chapter two, so we had to go and fix that now it's in a good spot for these updates that we released this last week and now we can start to focus on , like the user experience growing into more casual audiences and making that friendlier and then yeah, we're also augmenting that with Like other apps that kind of compliment the pixels ecosystem that can target a more casual audience without them having to know anything about crypto.

So some of this is one done by like the really basic stuff like better logging experience, you know, better tutorials. I think going mobile first on something like our pet app is going to be a big boost to that too. We're basically going to make sure that everything is app store compliant, do whatever we need to make that happen.

And that might mean sacrificing some of the Web3 components to actually make that happen. We think it's going to be the right call on that particular one. And then, yeah, then we can also start diving into like some of the interesting, like, K Factor optimization. That's the one thing that we saw really blow pixels up earlier.

Things like incentivized referrals, you know, incentivized content creation, all of that. It's, that looks a little bit more like traditional user acquisition spend when you start to model that out, but it's super effective inside of a web3 Because it feels a bit more real and it's a bit more like instant reward, right?

And then there's even some other features that we're starting to work on and implement Like one thing that we're working on is we're implementing a creator code Feature that's gonna look a lot like Fortnite’s so, you know, Pixels did 2.3 million in revenue last month. What that's going to do is basically you're going to be able to input a creator code and any purchase in pixels that you make, you'll get a 5% discount.

And then 5% of that will go back to creator. We're hoping to get some more like flywheels through that program and then. Yeah, in addition, there's some interesting stuff that we can do taking examples from, you know, other games that might have like real money components. Not that this is that, but, for example, one thing that we do and we're thinking a lot about is how can we have people have that magical moment in pixels earlier.

Running your first pixel is a really cool moment inside of web3. It feels really real. Some stuff that we can do, for example, would be giving people pixel earlier, but getting withdrawal until they do. Some interesting stuff like spend it or like some other outcomes basically, but it's kind of like free pixel, for us if they, you know, can't withdraw it.

So there's other onboarding experiences that we're working on there too.

Niko: Got it. Okay. A lot of experimentation going on. This is one key takeaway from this talk with you here. It's a lot of experimentation. So, again, haven't quite figured it out yet, haven't quite got a sustainable yet, but are on the on the path potentially to do so.

So curious to see how that goes. Come back. Of course, in the future, once you're like, we've got our first month of, you know, net positive return on reward spend RORS. I definitely want to be part of that conversation. Okay. I, we have some more time still. So I want to ask you a little bit about continuing on the, on the player piece here, I mentioned at the intro that you had your first ever web3 wedding. This is just a really fun story.

Why didn't you tell our listeners what this was all about? I think it's super cool, and, you know, does speak to engagement in the community does speak to some kind of kinship that players have, you know, as part of this ecosystem.

Luke: Yeah, I, that was awesome. So what is one of the biggest strengths of the pistols team is speed of iteration and getting stuff done quickly.

We're able to do that with, for a combination of things, like one, the team just works super hard. And we're able to respond really quickly because of that, too. We have a really great set of LiveOps tools and core pixels as well, that allow us to do, like, LiveOps events, create new things like that without any code changes, which is a huge advantage.

So we're able to spin up requests towards the community quite quickly. And, yeah, there was a community member, Cloud White, who was, like, really early in the Axie, like, beloved by their own community. And, yeah, he made a request like, hey, what if I did my wedding inside of pixels? And yeah, I mean, to me, that just sounded awesome.

So immediately when you asked that, we're like, absolutely yes. And it ended up being the most wholesome event that we've ever had. It was so special. I like, I literally.

Niko: I love the use of that word wholesome. I think because a lot, a lot of people still associate web3 rightly or wrongly, I mean, sometimes rightly, depending on what part of web3 you're looking at wrongly.

For the most part, it's just honest, hardworking developers trying to make things work and trying to experiment with stuff. But but yeah, wholesome. I just love that that word for this.

Luke: Yeah, that's something that we really try to push the pixel like this community is very wholesome I mean one what I'll say is like I think Filipino culture in general is extremely wholesome Yeah, if you guys haven't like dug into um, like the Filipino player base at all I think they get a really bad rep for no reason and it's actually a little offensive to me sometimes, but yeah, the culture is just like very goodwill and wholesome and very sweet.

And Yeah, I, I love it. So a lot of the player base in our game, like, they're actually very anti PvP features, like, even, we released an update one time where, you know, you have farm animals inside of the game, you have like, coops and chickens, and the chickens died, and they were very upset by that. They didn't like the fact that chickens would die in the game.

So that kind of, you know, it gives a picture into the pixels audience. Like they, we actually changed it so that the chickens fly away and they were much happier rather than dying. And yeah, I think that kind of shows. Just like that event to me really showed what the pixels community was. The amount of concurrent people that we had inside of that was insane and actually also I, I'm a really big fan of kydo when it comes to analyzing mindshare across like crypto and web3 in general, if you look the single biggest day of mindshare that pixels had besides the TGE was that wedding day.

Where I think our mindshare across web3 was like 11% compared to an average of like two. So yeah, I also showed that was like one of the advantages of pixels too. If we can respond to that kind of stuff and like, you know, build for the community. There's also a ton of benefit. Across the board with that, too.

Niko: Yeah, I think you guys sold a bunch of virtual suits and dresses. And, you know, so that's, that's a really cool thing. I was just thinking it's kind of ironic. I don't know if you thought about it this way, but, but, you know, you said you started out in a virtual events space, which was kind of a failed, you know, startup hard space to work in.

And you've kind of come full circle. I mean, a wedding in web3 is, I mean, isn't that the ultimate?

Luke: Yeah, so events are great. Like events are amazing for community building. You can't just have an events platform to like one virtual event. That was really successful too, was we posted the virtual version of finance blockchain week.

Um, and we basically created like the Coca Cola arena in Dubai in pixels. And we created like all the booths inside of pixels. And that was. So well done. I thought like props to the team on the implementation on that one, but there are 200, 000 visitors to like literally like all these virtual booths of sponsors inside of the game to, yeah, the amount of traffic that we're able to generate through some of these events, I think is impressive.

And yeah, it kind of shows that events do have a place, but you need one to combine them with live ops, I think. So having some kind of like reason to do that we're actually like, side note, we totally revamped our live off strategy this month to the kind of Facilitate that stuff a bit better. Um, and you need like an in game reason to, or you need that base of players that come in and make it better too.

Niko: Okay. And following on kind of final specific question on pixels here is, I hadn't seen these three letters combined since the heady days of 2021, 2022. But apparently, the community Dow is back the DAO. The centralized autonomous organization, and you have a treasury as well. So again, this has not been very popular, fashionable for the last few years ever since the early days when everybody, of course, did have a Dow.

And it was like, oh yes, we're going to have a Dow and the Dow is going to do this and that, but you're doing it. So tell me, so you've got to correct me if I'm wrong on the numbers here, but I believe you have a community treasury. It's about $7.6 million and you're gonna put that into the hands of a ao.

What are they gonna do with this? And, what, what is your vision for, why have a DAO in the first place?

Luke: Yeah, exactly. So I, I'm always of the opinion that just because the thing in web3 didn't work the first time doesn't mean that it won't mm-hmm. If you do it better. And to me, DAOs are really interesting when it comes to.

Basically like taking ownership over like some of the game's success in a way, right? You know, I always have to be careful about how I talk about this stuff, but what I'll say is we're going to be tying governance, this community treasury into staking. Like, that's going to play a big part, but we also like the idea of staking that isn't just solely tied into like whale incentives, but also combine something to do with gameplay and like other aspects of the ecosystem.

One interesting thing that we built out is a reputation system internally. Basically we give users points and reputation based on the way they behave in game. So our reputation system is basically like half in game actions and like on chain data. And half data science too. So the score isn't super clear to users and how they get it.

That's kind of intentional. Then we track all the like first party data that we have on users and we start to give them like more trust for certain in game actions. It's partly anti bot, partly like live ops oriented, all this, but it's also a pretty interesting mechanism to start to give governance, share to users inside of the ecosystem.

Also one that's not. Like completely able to be controlled by whales who might not have the best interest inside the game, but then also I really like the idea of community treasuries. And obviously this is something that is going to be community run. It's not completely in our hands of distributing back like some of the spend inside of the game to the right people inside of the game, too , so we kind of want to help guide them When it comes to making those decisions and give them the right rails to do it And we have some of the tech to help distribute rewards in smart ways now, right? That treasury is basically getting filled up every single month from revenue inside of the game, right?

So how it works right now is 80 percent of the revenue spent in game. So all the pixel goes into this community treasury. It hasn't been touched yet, but, you know, soon we're going to open it up for governance. And, you know, that's really up to the community to decide what they want to do with it.

But we really like that flywheel of basically pixel spent in game going there. And what's even more interesting is we're probably going to start to split up community treasuries by game inside of the ecosystem. Yeah, kind of our staking system, how we plan it right now. And again, I can't go like too much into the details, but I'll give like the high level because I think it's pretty cool and interesting is basically what we're going to do is we're going to have it so you can stake pixel in the ecosystem.

And when you stake, you're going to get to choose what game in the ecosystem you stake to right now there's two, but there's more coming. We're also still talking with other games and publishing acquisition deals too. So the ecosystem is going to expand more games pretty soon as well. Any game that joins the ecosystem, you know, kind of the deal is.

They start to share data back to pixels, so we can start to build out these player models stronger and better. We have even more first party data to work with. The other advantage, if you join the pixel ecosystem, is we're also going to start decentralizing missions a little bit on the top level. So right now, 28 million pixels every single month are earmarked for like core pixels distribution side of the game, right?

We've already started giving some of that 28 million to Pixel Dungeons to go out and acquire new users, right? I would love for this to be a bit more decentralized and to have stakers or like players of the game start to decide which game starts to get the pixel emissions, right? And I really love the idea of having stakers to those particular games own that community treasury and start to decide how that community treasury is distributed to.

So, it'll be a pretty interesting flywheel model that model is going to work even better when return on reward spend increases over one. And that's when it starts to get quite interesting, but until then basically we'll have some guardrails on where emissions go. So we don't want to interfere too much with core mission statement of getting us to that return on reward spend of one.

We're getting really great data inside of the pixels core right now, but yeah, it's eventually going to expand to a model where stakers maybe get to say over where like game revenue might go.

Niko: Interesting. All right. Well, good luck with that again. It's not to your point. It's not that it can't work.

It's just that. People didn't make the dial model work back in the, the, the first wave of web three adoption. So,  interesting to hear your model and definitely an innovation from, from what came before. Okay, well, I, we have time for my final question, which I ask all of our guests because we are a gaming podcast.

Three games, what three games are you playing right now or are most excited by?

Luke: Yeah, I, I just got a switch and started playing Breath of the Wild for the first time, which is kind of crazy. I haven't played until now. But yeah, I mean, even that game is giving me, like, so many ideas. I'm like, dang, we need way better questing inside the pixels, better narrative, better lore, better world building, better tutorials, kind of a wake up call playing that.

And it's cool to play it. I, when I do research on games, I actually, I play a ton of mobile games and like casual games to get research on best practices. That game I'm just playing because, you know, it's an amazing game, enjoying it. Yeah. And it's cool to like also just dive back into those kinds of games because I don't know, they're, to me, they're works of art and like the intention behind them is a little bit different than like mobile, free to play all of this, right? Like they're putting something beautiful out in the world and they want people to experience it. And I think that's a great intention to have with anything that you build and make.

And I kind of do that with like what we're doing with play-to-earn too. I think play-to-earn is going to be very, very useful to the world when we have it finished. It's not there yet though, but it's good to remember that. Other one I played recently, I started playing RimWorld. That game stresses me out though.

And Factorio too. We want to do some automation style mechanics inside the pixels. And, yeah, the new Factorio is, it's fun, it's dangerous, it's addicting, it's also so stressful. Like, that kind of game is maybe not for me. And, yeah, what else?

Niko: Um, What's three. That's your three right there.

Yeah, talk about world building. I, I just picked up Red Dead Redemption 2 again. I hadn't played it in years. I played it through like 98 percent or something like that when I played it through the first time, and I haven't had a lot of time in the last few years and I just picked it up. I still don't have a lot of time.

So actually, I'm not making a lot of progress, but I picked it up to sit on my horse and just ride around and just like appreciate the beauty of nature in that game, like occasionally do some hunting, but mostly just riding my horse around and I know that sounds really silly, but like that's sometimes what you need in a game.

You just need that escapism and you just want to like just go and hang out in a beautiful space with great storytelling and, you know, well done mechanics that aren't overthought.

Luke: I still go back to Assassin's Creed 4, Black Flag, and just ride around in a pirate ship and that's all I do.

Niko: So yeah, it's funny that you mentioned that Breath of the Wild because that's kind of how I'm viewing Red Dead Redemption 2 right now.

So, okay, well, that was it. That's all we have time for today. But you, Luke, thank you so much for coming on the pod again. I, you know, don't make it another year. Come back, come back a little sooner. I hope you've got your return on, sorry, I’m blanking on the term you R O R S return on reward spend.

Thank you. Yes, return on reward spend above one soon. And when you do, and you've held that for, for a month on any game and any product that you have come back and tell us all about it because you will then, I think, have been the very first ever to have cracked play-to-earn. And if that's the case, that's a momentous occasion and it deserves to come back on the pod for sure.

So thank you, Luke, for coming on today and hope to see you again soon.

Luke: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me.

Niko: Always a pleasure. All right. And of course, as always, a big thank you to all of our listeners. We'll be back next week with more interviews, more insights, and more analysis from the weird and wonderful world of gaming. So until next time, friends, feel free to send questions, guest recommendations, and comments to me. My email is [email protected]. Stay curious and keep on gaming.

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