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Stacked Revolution w/ Luke
Recorded: April 2, 2026 Duration: 1:04:44Space Recording
Full Transcription
Thank you. See you next time. Thank you. Thank you. so Oh, season. Thank you. Thank you. so Thank you. so so Thank you. so Thank you. See you guys later! See you guys later. Thank you. Good morning, good evening.
Welcome to the Gronin Radio.
We'll go live in a few minutes with Luke from the founder of Pixels
and who's now launching a platform called Stacked
and we're going to explore that with you guys today.
It's going to be a good one.
See you in a few minutes, guys. Thank you. Thank you. I I bounce back on the track, decided just a fucker I never had a 30 holder, weren't the type to looker
Tryna put on for my team and put on for the blocker
I got one eye for the snake, someone's for undercover
I bounce back on the track, decided just a fucker
I never had a 30 holder, weren't the type to looker
I was surrounded by the blood and some did like the cooker
Some prefer the Smiths and some did like the Drucker
DSG with panel chief and watch me whoosh up
Garbox in the back, can hear it getting shook up
And I can give you welcome corners like the Soho Hooker
If I drop it, tell my Aki bed and say it's Puka
And the time he is that fire loud
Come some overseas pounds
I just want a hundred different ways we all can eat now
And if I tell you that I got you then it means something
Send my niggas bread all the time and they don't need nothing
And when I wake up in the morning tryna eat something
My niggas in the other area tryna beat something
I'm tryna seek something, send a car and creep something
And wait for the call and ask him did they leave something
And I really like lying to my mum
And I fumble when she asks me where this money for my son
And I told her that I draw it from my legal every month
And I'm saving her, this music ain't paying me for fun
Uh-uh, it ain't paying me for nothing
Hence why I'm hitting corners, get it less than nothing
Straight from my brother, from another garlic oven
And no bitch for that bitch, I beg me for nothing
No bitch ain't begging for no backing back up, bitch, I'm from the hood
I don't think we cycle go key up my whip I wish you would
Wood wood
But you still gotta come around and tell you it's good wood
And the things I still say don't think you should should
Tryna put on for my team and put on for the blocker
I got one eye for the snake someone's foot undercover
I bounce back when the trap decided just to fuck up And I'm not gonna be a good guy I'm not gonna be a good guy I think he sure should Tryna put on for my team and put on for the blocker I got one eye for the snake, someone's foot undercover
I bounce back when the trap decided just to fuck up
I never had a 30-year-old, it weren't the time to look up
Tryna put on for my team and put on for the blocker
I got one eye for the snake, someone's foot undercover
I bounce back when the trap decided just to fuck up
I never had a 30- when it's hard to look up I need a hand in the door. This is late all night, all night, tryna write funds with Kimbo, try it out Thank you. I See you, Game Parker! Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, Caesar produced, they gave, they gave. music
GM everybody
got another banger for you guys today
we've got
industry legend Luke from Pixels today.
And they've freshly launched a new platform called Stacked.
And we're going to discover that with you guys today.
Have a look at it, ask him some questions,
and also get to know his thoughts on the industry as a whole.
So, yeah. Welcome, Luke.
Hey, guys. Thanks so much for having me sorry i'm calling from such a weird location today i don't know if that's one second oh no that's my bad give me can you not hear me or yeah i can
hear you sorry it's not it's not a ronin it's not a ronin radio show without some technical
mishaps on my end. Amazing.
Yeah, no, sorry.
I'm calling from a weird location today, but that's life, right? I was about to say, it looks quite calming, the location you're in.
Yeah, you know, it's not bad.
Where are you at in the world these days?
Miami.
Okay, okay.
With that tree behind you is not what I would have said. It looked like you're on a tropical island of some sort.
Yeah, Miami is nice. I appreciate you having me.
No, it's always a pleasure, dude. I was briefing with the team a bit before the show and we were like,
sometimes we forget how few successful products there are in Web3 and you and your team are one of the ones that have built that with pixels, right?
A massive hit while it was on Ronin, etc.
So always a pleasure to have you on and get your thoughts as someone who's actually built a successful product.
So, yeah, let's go through let's go through stacked
a little bit like for let's say that like for a viewer out there who's like never heard of it
never used it how do we explain it simply to them yeah stacked is basically a lot of the tech that
we've been building out behind pixels in order to make play to earn work packaged into a product so yeah for just like the average person watching this um basically it's just a new app that
you can go to and there's boards and pixels and other games soon um and then on like the studio
side we also built a product for game developers that basically makes it very easy to make your game play to earn as well nice and so like how how is
this um in what ways is this like better bigger than other questing platforms that we've seen
like what what makes this stand out in your eyes yeah so i think everyone who's played in the web
3 or um who's been a part of the Web3 ecosystem for a long time
knows that when you start to create incentive systems
or start to add in any kind of reward into your game,
it's very easily broken and botted, right?
And basically, it's really, really easy to make a bad reward system.
Like, you know, it's not complicated, right?
You just say, hey, we're going to give you a
reward for posting on X or something like that. And then you'll get hundreds and hundreds of bots
making posts, and you won't have any more rewards to give out, right? So a lot of the work we've
been doing at Pixels is to figure out how we can actually make a system that doesn't break its
scale, and can provide play to earn for the players and still make an ecosystem or you
know a business profitable right like it's actually you know it sucks to talk about that on the player
side but it's an important part right like if you don't have a game that can support itself and grow
and you know be financially viable then the game's going to shut down and those rewards are going to
drip anyway so essentially what i've been trying to do is create reward systems that don't drain the reward system and still reward players yeah yeah i think
what one of the when i saw when because for me when i saw that you guys were launching
launching stacked i was maybe i was out of the loop and you guys had like talked about it leaked
a bit before but i feel like i uh caught up with it when you guys launched.
And for me, it felt like a surprise
because it's like you guys were...
Last time where I was listening and paying attention on that,
it's like you guys were talking about building more games, etc.
So it was like a surprise to see a questing platform,
but the way you're talking about it there seems like it's...
I mean, it's all linked, right? It's a tool to empower pixels and also other games right yeah yeah so
it seems at first glance like it might be different from what we've been doing or pivot
but it's not because really it's what i like to say it's pixels is stacked and stacked as pixels
most of the tech that is inside of Stacked is being used in Pixels right
now. And it was developed with Pixels from the very beginning, right? So, and it's still a part
of the Pixel ecosystem too. So it's not even a divergence from Pixel, the token, or anything
that we're doing here. Basically what Stacked does for the stuff we've been previously doing
is makes our lives a lot easier building out pixels right
and it's also something that's useful for other teams too um the way that we engineer and build
anything and it's a good engineering practice to do that is you should always build stuff even if
only you use it with the idea of other people needing to use it too because as your team grows
as you want to maintain things it's just a good engineering practice so we had started building a
lot of our plate-earn systems
that way from the beginning.
And as we've been fine-tuning them
and making them actually work,
it's just kind of where we ended up basically.
Like we have a platform that makes Pixels better
and we can also share it with other teams.
Yeah, as you were talking,
the thought that occurred to me was,
even from my previous question about what makes this better than other questing platforms, and it's actually who's building it, right? Most people who are building questing platforms aren't necessarily teams that have built a successful game.
One of the ways this probably stands out is because you've built it for yourself,
but also for yourself as in Pixels, but also for the future products, right?
I'm trying to think of...
How has the launch gone?
Are you finding that...
What's the conversion rate from the players playing,
the active player base playing Pixels?
How are you finding the adoption so far? What's the conversion rate from the players playing, the active player base playing pixels?
How are you finding the adoption so far?
Yeah, so I consider this launch a soft launch. Because what we still need to do is, now we've released Stacked, right?
There's this concept of live ops in a game, basically managing a game's day to day after it releases. Right?
Now we have to kind of learn how to do that with Stacked also.
So we are tuning it by hand in the beginning stages
to make sure that we are keeping a close eye on rewards,
making sure that we're able to get enough out,
making sure they're going to the right places.
The next stage will be kind of adding an agentic layer,
which should speed up that process like 100x
so we can give out unique rewards to unique users like basically every day um but yeah we're in
live ops mode right now basically and learning how to do the live ops so um we've seen good
conversion of users using pixels and the stack like basically most users who are playing pixels
daily are using stack now which is great um but that's going to be the
key thing that we're looking at over the next like month before we start to open it up to more teams
like we need to fine-tune how it works inside of our own game and then we'll start to open up to
other games also yeah i was i was about to ask you like what what titles or what games can we expect
to to be on the platform soon are you already in discussion with certain teams?
Or are you just even that's on the back burner for now
as you focus on the live ops?
Yeah, we are in discussions with a bunch of other teams.
There was a lot of interest when we initially posted about it.
And I've been talking about this for a long time
with other people in the industry.
Yeah.
So, yeah, there'll be more games coming in soon.
The first thing that we need to do is we need to fine-tune it
and make sure it works really, really great for us.
Because we already had it in Pixels,
and we were working with it in Pixels,
but now it's kind of a bigger thing.
It's like a bigger launch.
So, yeah, this is like the live apps mode out of it, basically.
So my priority is essentially for the next month,
I want to make sure that it's feeling super good for Pixels users.
That way we don't have to maintain like four to five games at once at a fresh start.
Like we can just focus on Pixels, learn all the things we need to,
and then start to onboard other games.
Can I make one suggestion?
Because it's, is there, or maybe it's already planned, but is there,
will there be dark mode on the website?
Yeah, it's funny. I'm actually the one that designed it. And I was like, no, we're not be dark mode on the website yeah it's funny I'm actually the
one that designed it and I was like no we're not adding dark mode but yeah we
should add dark mode oh yeah because I guess it's it's it's it messes with the
theme and the color and all of that if it's dark but it's yeah it was my I'm
just addicted to dark mode so I'm sorry yeah we can get that we can get against against your wishes so i is it do you
have is it like the the projects or the that you want that will be joining etc is it will it solely
be like web 3 stuff or do you have your eyes also or maybe even context in because i can totally see
this working for like a web 2 game right is that is that part
of the plans maybe yeah exactly so honestly when we built this we weren't even we there was one
train of thought where we're like we don't even add web 3 to it um yeah yeah or like the web 3 is
just like a transition essentially um or like Web 3 is just the cash out functionality.
When I say the Web 3, I mean more like blockchain.
Yeah, the crypto rails, yeah.
Yeah, so we were always going to have crypto rails because crypto rails is like the best cash out available to man right now.
Instant cash out, no KYC.
It's a better option.
But one of the things we're debating is like how heavy we go on support of crypto games
versus Web2 games.
Because honestly, we built this with like Web2 products in mind.
Because essentially what you can do is you can turn a Web3 or a Web2 game into a Web3
game with this tech stack.
And one of the issues we found with our publishing system, like we have a decentralized
publishing system almost with staking, right?
Was there's not that many games out there that are actually publishable inside of web3
if you like really dig into it i've probably talked to every single web3 game that's out in
live now and you know there's a few ones that are doing pretty decent right but like how many web3
games are out there that are live 24-7 that are making revenue?
There might be less than 10.
Yeah, not enough to make a platform like Stackrun.
You need more.
You need to think bigger, right?
Well, yeah, exactly.
So there's two approaches that you can take with that then if you're trying to build an
ecosystem.
You can help games start up from the ground and go full indie route, which is kind of the route that Ronan was trying to take.
Or you can start to work with Web2 games to give them the Web3 benefits.
It's funny because anything you're building inside of Web3, it's going to face the same problems.
The problems that a platform like Stack is going to face is going to be the same problems that a chain like Ronan is going to face.
Where are the games? How do you get them in? How do you foster them?
Right?
Now, what's good about our tech stack is, you know, to join stack,
it's a really easy integration.
It's just like a few lines of code where you're logging events, essentially,
in the beginning stages.
And then what we can start to do is analyze player behavior
and start to give out rewards based on different
in-game actions um and yeah that's that's kind of the like short-term difference right now um how do
we build a system that is really really easy for other people to join um that's like also a no
brainer too like with stacked it's a much smaller scope than fully bringing something on chain
in the beginning stages.
There's not every single ownership layer in the game.
If you were to bring a game on the Ronin,
there'd be so many more player benefits
to fully bring a Web 2 game on the Ronin
versus fully bringing a Web 2 game on the Stack.
Like Stack, we just do the reward part, right?
Stack, we just do the reward part.
But it's so much easier to commit to it.
And it's so much easier of a value proposition in the beginning stages.
Because we can basically go to a game and just say, hey, we have clear case studies inside of our own games.
That implementing Stack increases LTV of your user.
It decreases the CAC.
And it's an easy sell that way.
So when I think about how you can actually bring Web2 into Web3,
like that's how I think about it.
Like how do you make it so that it's very low friction and low risk to try it
out and like a low commitment to try it out?
How do you make it so that the value prop of like joining this thing is super
obvious and like hard to say no to as well and like make
it a no-brainer um it's my guess especially for for for web 2 games and i think that's where
that's where probably the the fact that it doesn't look like it's crypto helps because you need like
yeah i think a lot of a lot of web2 games that would be one of the things that
adds friction is that they they don't want the they don't want their name besmirched with the
the the whole blockchain crypto thing and in the in the worry that they might lose lose their
lose gamers or stuff like that you know like how we saw like the hate hate from all the normies
about nfts and stuff like that i think yeah yeah i'm excited for sure
i'm excited to see what what uh what will be like the first web 2 title on on stacked do you already
have some ideas or well so here's the thing what can you link to us a little bit yeah when stacked
launches it's funny because like there's already this concept of play to earn
that's working a little bit in web 2 right now i think a lot of people in following web 3
haven't seen that um there's platforms out there inside the web 2 right now that are not as good
um as what stacked could be if we like fully get it working um but they basically will like pay you real money to go out and try a game like monopoly go
or like a match three game and all of this so yeah we can actually integrate those systems
and we'll have web two games you can earn rewards for when the mobile app launches
and we'll give you crypto rewards for it so you'll be able to get rewards for playing some Web2 games already and stacked.
And then we'll work on a fuller integration
with Web2 games after that.
Right.
So, yeah.
What...
What can you tell me more about your...
There you're talking about how...
What are your plans to enter some fresh markets
or marketing strategies to penetrate fresh markets?
I'm sure you have very creative ideas
with all your marketing experience.
What are some of the unique things you're maybe envisioning?
Yeah, there's a couple of things.
One is literally we're just going to start doing performance marketing.
What's performance marketing?
Which basically means running paid ads.
So yeah, Pixels has never really done that at scale,
but we actually have been testing it for the last four to six months.
The easiest way to grow Stacked will basically be to grow our own first-party games and have Stacked be the killer advantage that helps us grow the first party games better than anything else out there.
What do you call first party games? What do you mean by that?
Like the games that we build. So a first party game is just like the games that we're building in-house, right? So we have Pixels, obviously, and we have a new game coming out too, Chubbkins,
and we'll probably start working on other titles as well
pretty shortly after.
But the idea is, if I want to grow stacked,
what do I need to do?
I need games to grow stacked,
and I need stacked to help them grow better
than other places they would grow, right?
The best shot that we have of growing a game is, you know, we could go and like try to find the
perfect title that's perfectly ready for stacking. There probably are some out there, right? So we'll
go and do that. But the best chance that we have is most likely with our own titles, with pixels
and Chubkins and everything else that we build.
Because we know the system best.
We know how to build play to earn and marketing there best.
And essentially what we want to do is we want to start to market play to earn to more normies.
That's kind of the goal here.
Chubkins will be like a very normie game.
It's not going to be hard to play.
It's going to not even feel played at
when you first start playing it.
And then we're going to kind of like
catch the normies off guard with some
play-the-ear mechanics. And we're pretty sure
it's going to melt their brains.
Trick them by giving them free money
for a game they enjoy. They'll hate that.
Yeah. No, so I'm starting
to see the vision a little bit more like the the fact
that stacked is pixels and your other games and and vice versa as in like even how you're building
it's going to play like stacked is going to play a core part in uh anything you're building in the
future also right it's like you don't want it's almost like you don't want to build a game if it
doesn't work with stacked because that's probably means it's not the kind of game you want to be building,
is what I'm hearing from our discussion so far.
Yeah, like, I think it's...
Because on the surface, it just looks like a questing platform,
but there's a lot more to it, right?
And it's like, what you do with it, where you go from here.
So yeah, I was thinking when I was exploring it,
how do you feel about...
A lot of questing platforms have like a reroll function
or something like that.
Is that on the cards maybe?
Like what-
Maybe, yeah, there are more gamification layers
that we can do.
Here's the thing about this versus other stuff.
Like, you know, we're still...
It's going to take us a good month to fully get there.
The tech behind Stacked is a lot more sophisticated than other questing platforms that have come
out before.
And there's a lot more nuance and depth, basically.
Like, a lot of these questing platforms are rule-based,
where it's like, oh, if you're level 10,
we're going to give you this task, right?
Level 10 in this game, level 4 in this game,
X amount of dollars in your wallet,
then maybe we'll give you this task.
And, like, honestly, those kinds of ones
are more sophisticated than most others.
Now, with Stacked, we want to get to hyper-personalization, where basically every single user gets something
different.
Very granular.
Everything that they're doing.
So the ideal situation is, one, if we do show you a reward that doesn't seem fair or possible,
we just probably shouldn't show you that kind of reward again.
That's kind of the whole idea here.
We want to only give rewards that make sense to give.
Because that's where the efficiency unlocks are, right?
Yeah, I see. As in... No, I get it.
It's as in like, yeah.
So AI, does AI play a role in that then?
It has to, right?
To learn every user.
Even probably, I'm thinking very basically here,
but even if a quest stays on somebody's profile
and you see them logging in and they don't get the quest done,
after a while, you learn from that?
Yeah, AI is funny.
I guess my question is,'s yeah talk to me about
ai and its role in stacked is the question i was asking instead of that ramble so we're doing a
bunch of traditional machine learning um which is like a subsection of ai that kind of gets forgotten
about a lot um and like data science also so essentially how we built stacked was we kind of
built it like a recommendation system,
like an ad network, like all of these things you might have heard of before.
Those are not easy to build even in modern day.
And like LLMs took like a lot of the, you know, cool part of AI or the trendiness of AI.
But yeah, those are still all really solid work, essentially.
So a lot of what we're doing is we're doing trends over big data sets, segmentation, really
some of the basic stuff in order to help predict what a user might do when we give them a certain
reward or when we surface one in order to help predict, you know, what the reward outcome might be.
And what's really cool is we had that whole system set up and that's kind of the core of
stacked.
The thing that we've added on top is an agentic layer.
And that's where we're using like AI as the, you know, buzzword.
But it's working, you know, pretty well.
Essentially what it can do is it can use all these data science tools
that we developed where it's like, you know,
help predict what this reward might do.
It can go and take a look at all the data that we're collecting on like gameplay.
So it's like, oh, these players are normally engaging in these mechanics
and these types of players are normally engaging in these mechanics
and these types of players stop doing these mechanics after this happens.
And it can take all of these things together
and help suggest and create new rewards to give to users. of players stop doing these mechanics after this happens and it can take all these things together
and help suggest and create new rewards to give to users it can actually do some of the testing too
and it can read results of tests and help create new things based on those results it's basically
doing a lot of the work of what a data science would have to do where it's a lot it's so hard
to do this um individually like basically if you wanted this level of granularity
with every single game,
we thought we were going to have to do this first.
We thought we were going to have to have a data scientist
with every game that we onboard at the beginning stages.
Now it's like, no, we just have a data scientist
give general instructions for the agents
based on what they know
using all the tools that we have.
And they're doing a pretty good job of doing exactly what our data scientists
will be doing per game.
Yeah, this seems like, as someone who's not a data scientist,
but I would imagine that amount of data, it's almost scary, right?
How much data you have to deal with,
that you have at your disposal.
And it's like, what do you do with it?
How do you analyze it?
What's important?
But you guys have been talking about this and studying this
even since Pixels.
I remember tuning into the weekly AMAs you guys did,
et cetera, and you guys talking about that,
about every little action, where people go on their screens,
what grabs their attention where,
and all of these things.
And it's like, I just find it fascinating
to get to see inside your mind, I guess,
about taking all of you,
like what you've learned so far
and turning it into this.
So I'm excited to see where you guys go with it next how can we talk a bit
about like the economics and all that how how how does that work um like how does the
like the the yeah talk to me a bit more about economics on the platform
your thoughts on that yeah so there's like concept of micro and macro economics microeconomics is like this when you
start to drill until just one person behaves typically and i like to explain to people what
we're doing as we're building a system where we can reward people and we can still have the games
be profitable so that's important like i know the players don't like to think about that or talk
about that sometimes,
but basically you want the game to also be able to make money.
And it's not extracting.
It's like literally just building a business, right?
Like games have to make some kind of money
in order to keep the lights on, right?
Otherwise, players are extracting from the developers
and the developers can't actually support themselves
and pay their own salaries and, you know, live a life.
Then it just doesn't work, right? So like you need both of these things to happen like you need outcomes that feel good to
players you need outcomes that feel good to the studios so they can actually continue to build
games now how do you do that well the most obvious way and the first kind of reward to start with
would be thinking about
like a cashback reward.
When people are like, oh, how can you make play to earn profitable?
Well no, there's very clearly tasks that would obviously always be profitable.
Like for example, if you gave a reward to somebody who is spending inside of the game
and you gave them like 5% of that purchase back right that is a clear example
of an obvious reward that would clearly be profitable to the game now what's interesting
is like that's kind of lame to be honest um and you can get a lot more depth with play to earn
once you start to level it up um like a lot of what we talk about is also the macro side where a good example i bring
up often is if you just built a game that was only focused on bringing in whale users the really high
spenders one every game in crypto if they only focused on whales here's the real truth i've
taken a look at most other games inside of Web3. They have less than
50 spenders typically. I'm talking the bigger ones on Ronin also.
Like if you only had a game with whales, you would have 50 players inside of your game. It's
not a very good game. Not very successful, right? The reality is when you're designing economies,
people in free-to-play games already know this.
You need other players inside of a game for it to feel lively, for it to feel good, and for it to really work.
Games don't work if there's only 50 players inside of them.
And these other players have a lot of value for the ecosystem, and they should be rewarded also, essentially.
And this is already verified inside of Web2.
Essentially, giving out rewards for different types of users
or retaining, sorry, not giving out rewards.
People in Web2, they want to retain or acquire different types of users.
That's why they'll spend a lot of user acquisition dollars
not just on whales, but other segments of users.
The same thing can be done with rewards.
Where it's like, yeah, obviously, these players might not be spending so much,
but they still can get rewards because we want them in the game we want to keep them retained and them being inside
of the game leads to a better overall outcome for the game and for those players yeah it's like if
you you don't uh you wouldn't even have those 50 whales in a game if you didn't have all those
other players because people those 50 people one of the main reasons a lot of people, the people who spend in-game spend,
is like to show off virtually and stuff like that.
So if you don't even have a player base that you can show your shining piece,
new piece of armor to, then you don't even have, you don't have a game.
Can I, like, what, I imagine, like, you were talking about the fact that you talk to a lot of the other games, the other game devs.
What do you see in the industry that you like from other games?
Like, what comes to mind when you think of that?
Like, things that are being tried and that you see unfolding?
Inside of Web3, inside of of web 2 just in general i guess i either
i guess like because yeah you're like i think your your insight would be valuable yeah i mean inside
of web 3 um risks to earn is still interesting to me it's not the area that i want to be building
in but i think it's one of the most surefire ways that will work in crypto um we're building something that's different than
risk to earn it's play to earn but risk to earn is a model that definitely will work inside of
crypto so the team's experimenting with that um and like really diving into that i think is very
interesting um i actually think the um like like new product that Ronin launched was quite
interesting.
I do think that the Southeast Asian market is often very overlooked and it is
very powerful and building out, uh, like trading card products specifically for
that market is interesting.
Um, yeah, is what it's called.
We had them on the show last week and it was when...
Yeah, because I think they launched last week, right?
Yeah, they launched a couple of days before the show.
Yeah, it's an interesting approach that you don't see many people doing.
But as we know with the surge of Axie, et cetera, Southeast Asia is very powerful
when they all unite under a product, under a game,
and it's like the whole world always overlooks it, right?
I guess it's akin to games focusing on the whales
as opposed to the whole player base, right?
It's like there's great power in numbers, I guess.
Yeah, exactly.
I'm very interested in the Southeast Asian and Brazilian markets still.
Like those are probably where we're going to spend most of our time and energy and focus
for all of our stuff. Yeah, they're interesting markets.
Yeah. What about in Web2 then about like the, what do you see in the gaming sphere that you like?
Yeah, so in Web 2 there's two big trends going on right now, which are interesting for the Web 3 side of things.
It's funny because the Web 3 stuff, we were all right about a lot of the stuff that we were talking about.
Basically real money gaming is becoming much bigger inside of Web 2.
Things like Triumph is a good example.
It's like a casual betting.
Like, you can play Flappy Bird, and you can bet against other players that you're going to be better at Flappy Bird.
It's funny because they go through a lot of anti-bot issues.
But yeah, it's interesting.
That's a trend.
Obviously, gambling, Polymarket, again, not a fan of that.
But it's pointing towards more real money elements
getting added to more normal parts of life.
I think there's better ways to do that that are not so like i think a thing like polymarket pump fund like those are quite extractive
not something that i would want to be building myself but there is obviously clearly consumer
demand um for that and it's growing um and then yeah play to earn is becoming a bigger trend
inside of web2 right now.
I think a lot of people have missed that.
What we're doing here in Stacked, I'm not going to lie, it's not entirely unique.
Because there are similar play to earn apps in Web2 right now.
Now, what we're able to do because the team has such deep experience is we can offer a much richer play to earn experience.
But there are a couple of play to earn apps inside of Web2 right now in the last year or two that have really started to take off yeah i mean that's where
yeah that's where your edge is i guess is your experience behind building pixels etc
and and yeah so and okay and so what's what are your views on Ronin at the moment, like with the transition to L2
and in these tough market conditions, et cetera?
What are your thoughts on how things have been unfolding?
I mean, yeah, Ronin's best shot
is having great products on Ronin.
So it has two options on how to do that.
Just the same thing that I was describing with, you know,
Stack and our problem.
How do we grow Stack?
Well, we need to either work with really great partners
or we need to build our own great stuff, right?
So Ronin has to do the same thing.
Now, Stack is going to live on Ronin.
Stack will have multi-chain support, but like the home base will be on Ronin has to do the same thing. Now, Stacked is going to live on Ronin. Stacked will have multi-chain support,
but the home base will be on Ronin.
And like most players on Stacked will be on Ronin.
Ronin's also working on a new game themselves too.
So I think they recognize the same problem, the Axiom MMO.
And I actually think that they have an amazing chance
if they get it right
to really build something huge and great with that and if that works like all of ronan's problems
will be figured out i can tell you that um they just need like a they just need a hit um but
yeah i think they're doing the right stuff web3 gaming is just in the hard spot right now, right? Because it's in an area where it's not just, you know,
oh, you have to build a product and, like, that's the same quality as Web2.
It's like, no, people actively hate Web3.
So you're kind of fighting against the title current, right?
the tidal current, right?
You don't have any of the speculation layer that you used to have.
You don't have any of the speculation layer
that you used to have.
So yeah, you have to fight against the tide, basically.
But if you have a great experience
and a great product, people will use it.
So that's still what we need to do and figure out.
And I think that's what Ronin's on track to do.
Do you think a hit is possible in Web3 not just run in but yeah yeah definitely i mean
when before pixels hit everybody was saying web 3 gaming was dead right and then pixels hit and
it spurred like a year and a half two years of like oh web 3 gaming is back right um so yeah
it's totally possible you just need a good game with the right economics at the right
time what's great about axes they have yeah i was gonna say sorry but you're answering it like what
what do you think that looks like what do you think the that hit looks like actually is a huge
treasury still i think people forget that yeah um so i think they're gonna be all right like they
just need the product behind it right and if they the right product, they'll be able to do what they need to
to grow it sufficiently.
The team has experience.
The team's been there and done that.
They've seen, like,
more than anybody else inside of Web3.
But yeah, they need the game out.
They need it to be good.
They need it to be sustainable this time around.
And, like, tools like Stack maybe could help them, which is cool, right?
Yeah. You guys have always been proponents
with pixels of building in public, right?
That's why you're doing your AMAs and you were updating things as you went.
What are your thoughts on them doing it as playtests
i know they're very early in the build right but it's like do you think at what stage would would
you suggest to them like to just put it live and build you know like so that people have something
to sink their teeth in or do you think yeah there's definitely i don't know like um i think
building in public was the right call for us.
It's not easy. It's really hard. Um, and sometimes it's a little distracting and like not good ways,
but I wouldn't change what we did. I could see why it wouldn't work for every team though.
Um, like sometimes if you are genuinely building the right thing, it's good to just be heads down
and get it out right um it's
like you know the iphone apple doesn't build in public right because they they're pretty sure what
they're going to build is the right thing most of the time but then sometimes they do flop so that
is the risk um but also imagine if they were building in public and like the loudest like
noisiest people were like you need to add six camerasiest people were like, you need to add six cameras.
And they're like, oh, we need to add six cameras.
Okay, we'll do that.
Like sometimes you get the wrong feedback too.
So building in public, it takes a lot of discipline to make sure that you are understanding what people are saying and understanding why they might be saying something but not taking
every single suggestion at face value yeah no and i can especially at this crucial time where
the game really needs to be a hit you can't afford to be derailed by by a loud voice right it's it's
or by the wrong loud voices right they it's the things need to stay in the lab for now, I guess.
Yeah.
And even when we're talking about Web3 Gaming, all of that,
and Ronin, there's not that many games that I can think of
that are even outside of Ronin, right?
I know there's a few, but a few, but like all of this,
it's the industry is weakened at the moment,
but a lot of the products are on Ronin.
So it's like, I think we might, if things go well,
if Ronin gets its big hit,
we'll all be looking back and thinking about this time
where there was almost no one here.
Yeah.
How long do you think- Yeah like the lull that we're in will take?
Like how long do you envision this going on for?
I don't know.
I almost feel like this next bull market won't be as sexy as the last.
I don't think everything will run.
I think only the things that are actually
fundamentally solid will.
I do think this market right now
is really undervaluing some stuff.
It's crazy.
If we were to go out and raise an equity valuation
for like stock, it would probably be worth a lot more
than token valuation, which is kind of funny
um but yeah that's kind of the idea like there's i think there's a pricing mismatch right now in
like projects that are fundamentally sound i think that projects that are fundamentally sound will
stand out in the next few years and again it won't be so sexy they'll be like oh this company's
growing 20 or like 10 10% month on month.
Yeah.
What projects come to mind when you, when you say that?
Well, that's the hard part.
Like how many, one, I would look at projects right now that are able to generate revenue.
And like, honestly, I would look at projects that generate revenue outside of your native
token.
That's a good thing to be looking at also unless the project was able
to do like significant um like burns but i don't know of any project that has netburn with their
native token um so i look at projects generating revenue outside of their native token to have some
kind of yield going to it still yeah which is rare in the industry i guess but it's like sometimes it
feels like it's like the the chicken or the egg isn't like which will come first like
the like a hit and a good product but you need yeah i'm getting a bit lost in my thoughts sorry
but it's it it sure it sure are interesting times that we're in
because it's just like we're in a bit of a lull,
but that's also the best time to pick your winners, right?
So, yeah.
Overall, how have you been doing also?
Because launching a product, but also like, I always wonder, especially for founders that are working hard in a space that's being undervalued with the market conditions that we're in.
Is it, how does, how does that weigh on you?
Like, is it.
I mean.
You seem to be enjoying Miami and like the, the calmness of Miami, but like overall, what do you, what, how does that make you feel?
Yeah. I mean, I feel a great responsibility to everyone who's believed in us. Right. And, you know, I want to prove to people that we are building something like real here. I want to prove to people that you know this stuff can work so i i just
think about that like my responsibility to like all the people who believed in us
like on the personal level right like i'm fine don't worry about me um but yeah i take i take
this role seriously right and i just want to build something that works and like help reward the
people who believed in us including like team you the people who believe in us, including like team, you know, people who are here.
Yeah, all of that.
Yeah. I guess the last last question I want to tackle is also like, how does it look like for, let's say a game is listening to us right now?
Like, how do they how do they get involved if they want to get on Stacked?
How does how does that look like? How does the process look like for a game that wants to be on your platform
in the future yeah message me on x even though i'm locked out i'll get back tomorrow um or message
pixels on x like that one i have access to right now um or yeah there's a form on the website so you can fill that out and
i'll get in touch with you but yeah we're open to working with people like i said our first like
month we're going to really focus on making sure the experience is great for you know our games and
pixels users but like if you have a use case or you have a game out that's like a good candidate
now we'll work with you now to get ready yeah Yeah, nice. OK. Well, congratulations on the launch.
And yeah, let's, for anyone in chat,
the website is stack.xyz, right?
So that's where people need to go
to just check out the platform,
see how you feel.
And especially once dark mode is added,
it'll be even more enjoyable.
So yeah.
I can see the reluctance in your eyes.
So yeah, thanks for coming on today.
Thanks for showing us Stacked.
I think it would be interesting to have you on in the future
once more games are on there to get your thoughts on that, on how that process is going.
And yeah, thanks for coming on.
Thanks, man. Appreciate it.
See ya.
All right, bye.
Bye.
Yeah, so that was interesting i think um even just on a personal level i enjoyed
getting to understand a bit more of the vision because honestly you wouldn't expect people who've built a very successful game to go then to a route of making a quest platform but as he said it it's
like it's more than a questing platform it's like it's it's it is a play to earn platform it's like
uh a game in itself. And we'll see.
For now, I'm excited.
What I've got going in my head right now is just thinking,
excited to see the directions that they pick,
how innovative they get with their marketing,
what markets they manage to penetrate.
And that's what will make this platform bigger,
better than the counterparts that it might have.
So, yeah.
Yeah, that was a good show.
And, yeah, I'm excited to have him on in a few weeks,
in a few months to see how that whole process is going.
So, yeah.
Thanks for tuning in, everybody.
And we'll see you guys next week. Thank you. I'm not a chance that I can't hear any of you fuckers right now and you actually are
Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh
