Pixel Master started out as a community art project, a digital painting that participants could add to by purchasing pixels with the digital currency EOS. When the game started, pixels were cheap, but prices rose as canvas real estate grew limited. At one point, a pixel in the game cost more than US$25,000.

Pixel Master is essentially the blockchain version of “r/place”, the famous pixel game on Reddit. It also has a dash of the Ethereum game Fomo3D, with artists scrambling (and paying) to get their work onto the canvas in the final hours before the cutoff. That’s how the game worked: if the pot of user fees from pixel purchases failed to increase by 0.5% per day, the game would end and the last pixel pot would be distributed to the players who purchased pixels within those final 24 hours.

On October 29, Pixel Master officially ended, with a total pixel pot of 22,271.8 EOS distributed to the players who purchased pixels on the last day. The final picture will be saved on the blockchain permanently, and users spent a total of 163,423.5 EOS (about $842,000) making it.

The sudden end of Pixel Master surprised everyone. The Fomo3D game on Ethereum, for example, only ended unexpectedly because a hacker found a way to game the system.

According to data from DappRadar, we can see an increase of players and trading volume in the last 24 hours of Pixel Master’s existence, but because the total pot didn’t increase by 0.5%, the game abruptly ended. We don’t know exactly why the pot didn’t increase. 

Is EOS becoming a Gambling Platform?

Pixel Master is over, but the EOS ecosystem keeps growing, and may even eventually surpass Ethereum’s. According to DappRadar, the daily active users of the top 10 Dapps on EOS have reached 21,101, with 1,213,046 transactions and a trading volume of 7,272,327 EOS, while Ethereum falls far behind with 5,908 users, 29,606 transactions and a trading volume of 11,029.8 ETH. Over 9 Dapps on EOS attract more than 1,000 users per day.

However, of the top 10 Dapps on EOS, 7 are gambling projects, including EOSBET, EOSDICE, EndlessDICE and FarmEOS. We can see in the above charts that 50% of the total 123 EOS Dapps are gambling apps. And in the last 24 hours, users of EOS gambling Dapps accounted for 72% of the total number of active EOS users, while the users of game Dapps made up an additional 12%. The 24 hour trading volume of gambling Dapps on EOS is equivalent to 78% of the platform’s total trading. Gambling and games account for 92% of EOS’s total transaction count. It's no wonder some people call EOS the “gambling” public blockchain. 

But is this necessarily a bad thing?

Take a look at the three images below.

The image on the left one is what Pixel Master's picture looked like when the game first became popular. The middle one is the final Pixel Master picture, the one that has been saved to the blockchain. The image on the right is the final picture of the original r/place game on Reddit. We can see that in the Reddit picture, it is very easy to identify various image elements like the Mona Lisa or the national flags. Pixel Master's picture tells a different story. Although we can still identify some Chinese slogans in the image on the left, the final version is more of a mess. People wanted to buy pixels just in the hopes of being a winner, leading to a lot of meaningless imagery that cannot be identified clearly.

This may be the difference between blockchain games and traditional ones. While traditional games are driven by fun, blockchain games are often all about the money. By comparing “r/place” with EOS Pixel Master, we may be able to extract some inspiration for a more interesting version of profit-oriented games:

1. On Reddit, players were allowed to paint a pixel every five minutes, which is fair for all players. However, in Pixel Master, players with more capital could buy more space. As a result of this difference, players on Reddit tended to cooperate with each other, while those on EOS were more likely to play by themselves. To improve the fair participation of players, it would be better to design a more reasonable threshold for users to access the game.

2. In Pixel Master, players could override other players’ pixels by paying a premium of 35%. For future games, it would be good to build a new incentive mechanism to encourage collaboration. For example, create a token incentive for players to paint a Pikachu cooperatively. This could help make the game more fun.

3. To intensify the sense of competition, Pixel Master could keep the design of overriding others’ pixels at a premium, but with incentivized rewards for cooperative behavior and punishments for disruptive behavior. Say there is a competition to cooperatively paint the Mona Lisa, for example. Once finished, all participants would be rewarded. But some people could make trouble, for example by adding white paint to areas that should be black. Under Pixel Master's current rules, the cooperating players would have to pay money to the troublemaker in order to paint those areas black. But the game could set rules so that the troublemaker does not receive the full 35% premium, but rather only 20%, with the other 15% going into the incentive pool. When the Mona Lisa is completed, all contributors would receive an amount of this incentive pool proportional to their contribution.

Games like Pixel Master can help us to use token incentives to better understand human behavior. Repeated attempts to design new incentive mechanisms will also provide data and research materials to create more informed token economies.

In other words, we shouldn’t be too critical of Pixel Master. Even a gambling game can be a meaningful social experiment.