Pixels CEO Luke Barwikowski Talks Chapter 2, Scaling The Game, and Building For Long-Term Success

In the latest episode of his Blockchain Gaming World podcast, editor-in-chief Jon Jordan talks to Pixels CEO Luke Barwikowski about the growth of the social RPG, which is now the most popular blockchain game in terms of daily active wallets.

Pixels CEO Luke Barwikowski talks to Jon about the growth of the social RPG, which is now the most popular blockchain game in terms of daily active wallets. They also discuss the problems of scaling the game and building out the developer for long term success, Pixels’ Chapter 2, which will change many of the game’s underlying features, making it more exciting for players individually as well as building out deeper progression for in-game guilds, and more.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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BlockchainGamer: How’s it going being the most popular blockchain game?

Luke Barwikowski: The more scale that you get, the more attention you’re going to get, the more bad actors you’re going to bring into an ecosystem. We took security super seriously after the release of our token. We moved hundreds of millions of dollars through our software in the first couple of days, so we knew that was the biggest, most important priority. People tried to take advantage of that. People tried to hack us, but overall it was a really smooth launch. We’re really thankful for that because the team put a ton of time, energy and effort before the token was out to make sure that we were safe, secure and solid.

And then as we’ve scaled, there’s also other issues that start to come up. Servers, infrastructure, the normal stuff like that. Our dev team is amazing, so they’ve done a really good job of scaling. It is not an easy thing to do, to scale a multiplayer game to a million DAUs, especially when it’s real time, all these concurrent users.

When it comes to org building, we’ve been thinking a lot about that too. We’re in a really amazing spot where we have a lead (if you want to call it that) in terms of web3 gaming users so what we want to start to do is think about how we set the organization up for the next two to five years.

What we want to be known for is not being a web3 gaming company. In the next five years, we want to be in the conversations of all gaming companies. We want to be a top five gaming company. Setting the organization up for that is the struggle right now; thinking about how we want to build moving forward. What are the things that we should focus on? What kind of talent do we need? And how do we continue the things that have been working really well for us?.

For example, when we first started scaling up, I thought we needed to professionalize the organization a little bit more. I still think we do need to do that to some extent. But also I think what we’re going to start doing is doubling down on the things that people really love about us, which is shipping really fast, giving new updates to the players, keeping them involved in the process. Trying to figure out how to do that at scale with the attention, it’s kind of the fun and tricky part, but that’s the next focus, basically.

Last time we spoke, I think the team was about 15 strong. Has that changed a lot?

No, not significantly. We’re being really careful who we bring on. What’s great is that in 2021, when I was trying to hire talent inside of web3 gaming, it was very difficult. I could get very few people from the industry to sign on.

It’s turned for us now where I think some people are waking up to what web3 gaming can be and we’re getting a lot of really good inbound interest. So as we’re building out, the big things I’m looking for is do people want to work hard and be part of something new, because bringing in corporate talent isn’t always the best fit.

We need people who are willing to be hungry. We also need that professional experience that we haven’t had on this team before too. This is a young scrappy team that’s just figuring out how to make things work and now we want to combine both of those things.

You’ve become something of a figurehead for blockchain gaming. How are you finding that?

It’s cool to know that I can maybe help make the industry better because we have a lot of lessons that we’ve learned from actually having a game out. There are lessons that you can only learn when you have a game out. That was partly why I wanted to work with Sky Mavis and the Axie Infinity team so badly because once I started building a web3 game and we had a live web3 game, I realized, you need experience to understand what the problems even are.

So yeah, I just want to do my part and help other people in the space make the space better. Because if the space grows, that’s also good for