Pixel Progression #26

Welcome to Pixel Progression #26!

October is upon us, which means spooky month is slowly ramping up to be spookier and spookier.

Earlier this week we unveiled our content road map for October. If you missed it, here you go:

If you'd like more details, there was a more detailed post in our community server!

We've been REALLY busy lately, as you might have been able to tell if you've been up to date. If you haven't been, here's a recap of JUST September!

• We launched fishing season 4, including an all new season pass and 2 new seasonal locations
• We brought back blackjack, and made a series of buffs to gambling commands
• Made vast improvements to flows and their reliability
• Made multiple improvements to f2p player perks

The work hasn't stopped! Upcoming in the next month or two includes:

• Discord in-app monetization (subscriptions/gems)
• A month full of spooky new things (see above!)
• More server events: See the next section
• Improvements to server discovery
• and more!

We're doing the final touches on a massive update that will add a ton to do for the day to day player.

• Tons of random events spawning in servers like the good old days
  • In these events contain cooperative AND competitive gameplay
  • Multiple events contain all new items to collect
• A new server-wide event, similar to mythical fish called "Search Spawns"
  • In this event a search location not normally available will be available server wide for a few hours
• A server leaderboards system, that adds time modifiers and competition to servers
• A giveaway requirements system, a way to set global requirements in order to participate in giveaways (BETA)
• Vast improvements to our server dashboard
  • Admin override roles (let certain roles bypass all permission rules)
  • Ping roles for mythical fish and search spawns
  • A revamped discovery page, letting people find the servers they want to find easier (including robbing targets)
  • A tag system for discovery to help people know what your server is about, quicker We expect this update to ship in the next week or so as we finish up polishing what's left of it.

The deadline for Discord's new monetization requirements is upon us this week, so all our current development efforts are temporarily placed here. We don't expect this to take long, and we'll have a dedicated blog post and tutorial about the quirks of this new monetization system soon.

We recently released our server dashboard for servers to manage their bot settings (and more...).

We're still looking for feedback and suggestions for this dashboard if something is bothering you or missing that you'd need from us. Please direct this feedback into the suggestions channel in our community server!

This section will contain a lot of yapping about some logistical monetization systems for games like ours. The TLDR is: "When trying to dip out of 'p2w' heavy systems, we find little return in player sentiment for lots of negative income effects".

So lets talk about the costs associated with running a game like ours. Here are just a few (not all) of our largest month to month costs:

• Servers and Cloud functionality
  • Maintaining a stable uptime and robust frameworks to deal with emergencies doesn't come cheap
• Contract Work
  • Every person on the team except me (Mel) gets paid an hourly rate, no matter how much money the business is bringing in.
• Tooling & Business Expenses
  • A lot of the software (and hardware!) it takes to run a business is not cheap, the monthly costs add up very quickly. Even things like surveys, marketing emails, and time tracking all cost money
• Taxes
  • Even past all the expenses, there's a lot of money that gets taken from paying taxes, often at a higher rate than someone working a 9-5 job.

And all of this costs money no matter how many players we have, and no matter how many of them are paying for gems or subscriptions. In the end, our game IS entirely free to play, and a majority of our monthly players (~350k-400k) are free to play. Less than 1% will ever pay for anything, which is pretty standard.

In fact, the MORE people who play (free or not) the higher costs get with multiple of the above expenses. For instance when fishing is really popping off, we need to scale up our cloud infrastructure which directly and quickly increases costs. So every time there's a popular fishing event? We're burning money for your enjoyment!

So, since it's not, in our opinion, a possibility to charge to PLAY the game as we know many of you cannot afford to pay, we have to find a way to not only recoup our costs month to month, but retain the time and talent of the team we have. We have to make a profit for the business to continue.

Right now, and a majority of months since 2020, we have been profitable. During covid we were very profitable, but also burning way more money with an outdated infrastructure and lots of chargebacks. Now that people have moved on largely from being on Discord all day, we're only minorly profitable but stable for the time being.

A few weeks ago, due to feedback by f2p players, we removed universe boxes from being able to be bought as we've heard repeatedly that it was "too pay to win". I 100% understand and emphasize with that feedback, and it's why I was willing to do this experiment.

So we took a baseline of daily players, weekly players, commands being ran, and our average income and we removed those universe boxes. Now looking at it, our player retention is unchanged weekly, and actually lower daily. Commands being ran is about the same. But our income took a 15% dip over our average from the time previous to this change.

This dip in income is unfortunately not sustainable, it brings us down into the realm of being unprofitable over time if anything bad happens. The natural conclusion now would be, we should add universe boxes back and continue to just offset the light inflation that they cause like we've already been doing with things like gambling.

However, I know just because the numbers looked about the same doesn't mean you all didn't enjoy people not being able to buy these OP boxes, so I'm doing one last hail mary.

I've made this short survey that I'd love for you to fill out, to find a path forward to increase our income to offset not selling things that are TOO "p2w". If you could take 5 minutes to fill out this survey (f2p or otherwise) it would greatly help us find something to avoid needing to add universe boxes back to the gem shop.

Here is the survey link: Monetization Survey

Thank you, and I hope you appreciate our transparency on this and will help us find a path forward to help this business not only be sustainable, but ideally grow and hire new people to bring new products and experiences to everyone.

We are aware a large number of (mostly tiny) bugs has backed up lately. Soon we will be fixing a large wave of these at once. They aren't being ignored, we're just trying to manage our time between new/improved features, and fixing bugs.

• Get the full list here: Public bug tracker

We're going to be discontinuing the pixel showcase segment of this post due to very little interest.

Instead, as we see standout additions on reddit of things like fan art or similar creative posts, we'll reach out directly as we see fit to reward them no matter what time of the month it is.

Posting on reddit with your creation is the best path forward, and we'll still be giving the pixel trophy and gems to those putting in effort that puts a smile on our team.

2024 is slowly coming to an end, just a few more posts left.

At some point this year our updates will slow down as we start working on bigger systems and backend tooling, but until then, I hope you're enjoying the constant and rapid improvements.

I'm drinking water flavored like fruit today, hbu?