Merit Circle (@MeritCircle_IO): How Pixelmon Turned Epic Failure into Excitement and Success

How Pixelmon Turned Epic Failure into Excitement and Success To NFT believers, it was a head-in-the-hands moment. To the NFT cynical, it was a huge ‘You see? What did I tell you?’. We are, of course, talking about the NFT project that nearly ended NFT projects altogether: the one and only Kevin and his band of Pixelmon pals. 🖼️ https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GcG2_tCW4AAX5HN.jpg For the uninitiated, Pixelmon exploded into the NFT hype arena with enormous fanfare off the back of its successful Pokémon-meets-Minecraft mod. Displeased with the mod’s use of voxel versions of Pokemon, Nintendo had the mod shut down, but anticipation around the forthcoming NFT collection grew and grew, driven partly by the touted development of an AAA-quality Pixelmon web3 game. The Pixelmon NFTs – at 3 ETH each – sold out within an hour of launch. But when the project’s artwork dawned on buyers, their stomachs dropped like stones. The NFTs – brand new designs, including Kevin, to break away from the contentious Pokemon-ish designs of the Minecraft mod – were terrible (https://cryptobriefing.com/hype-bad-art-deception-pixelmons-70m-rug-unpacked/). Like, laughably bad. Or, if you’d committed to buying one, tear-jerkingly, sickeningly bad. What’s worse, to many buyers, it felt like the project’s creator then simply crept off set, disappearing into the ether with their vast 23,055 ETH / ​​$65 million takings, and that, seemingly, was that. A spectacular dud of a project. A rug pull and an embarrassment for web3 evangelists. RIP Pixelmon. A Kevin-shaped phoenix from the ashes 🖼️ https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GcG3Ds4XwAA3nrm.jpg But just as bubble wrap found its true purpose after failing as textured wallpaper (true) and Listerine as a cure for smelly feet (also true), it turns out there was life in the old Pixelmon dog yet. What current CEO Giulio Xiloyannis observed as an outsider to the project was that while Pixelmon had its (gigantic) faults, it also had something pricelessly important: a community. A dubious, angry community in many respects – but a community nonetheless. This was a three-pronged eureka moment for Xiloyannis. “In 2021, we set up a company called LiquidX (https://www.liquidxgroup.xyz/) – just an indie blockchain gaming studio,” he explains. “We soon realized it's better to build a game with a community alongside you than closed in a box.” In other words, developing a game is much easier if you have cheerleaders supporting and even guiding your work. Then there’s something unique to web3: the intersection between NFTs, games and communities. “If you look in the blockchain space, the great communities are all around NFT collections.” Leveraging a niche cohort: adult monster-collectors 🖼️ https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GcG3HA4WsAA1ip3.jpg Yet surely there was something still missing here. Sure, this NFT collection + nascent game had a community, but it was a pissed-off one. Why did this seem promising to Xiloyannis? The answer is down to a chance moment in cultural time: the maturing of Pokemon fans from kids to adults – or if not adults, then not quite kids. Xiloyannis decided that he and LiquidX had the opportunity to capture the “adult monster-collecting” zeitgeist. (Note the hyphen – he’s talking about adults who collect monsters, not the collecting of grown-up monsters.) “All the NFTs had dropped to nothing – something like a 95% drop,” says Xiloyannis. “But Kevins were above mint price.” And there have been few NFTs as monstrous as Kevin. What Xiloyannis recognized was that “there is currently no clear winner in that [adult monster-collecting] space. There is no huge player. But Pokemon is the biggest IP in the world by a factor of five – it’s ten times bigger than Star Trek. Now, I still love the idea of being a Pokemon trainer, but the products are just not challenging or engaging enough. There just isn't an adult version of it, yet there’s serious monster-collecting nostalgia among the biggest cohort of players in the world.” We might ask why they didn’t make their own collection of monster NFTs, if they were so sure of this thesis. “The market is too irrational,” says Xiloyannis. “Buying rather than creating our own collection was the right thing to do.” They had the Kevins after all. Giving the community what it wants 🖼️ https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GcG3LXsW8AALBuU.jpg So how were Xiloyannis and LiquidX to progress from this point? While the community was angry, many were still curious about the future. They had one big question for the collection’s new owners: “Are you still going to make the game?”. So that’s what they did, in a sober, reliable, transparent way. “My thought was, we're not gonna fix this by making huge promises all over again. We're gonna fix this by continuously announcing actual things we’ve done. So we actually didn't give a roadmap. We just said, ‘Every week I'll tell you what I've done.’ And for many weeks, it was just hires. But within two months, it was the best 3D poly art for monsters and I think overall in NFTs.” Concurrently, they gave holders a fair chance to get out: “We created a moment in time, which was short, where even the worst-off holder could get out in the neutral. And the average holder could have gotten out with a 2.5x.” Since then there has been a lot of listening to the community and adjusting Pixelmon products accordingly. There are now four games (https://www.pixelmon.ai/#games), expanding lore, a full-season anime series (https://x.com/Pixelmon/status/1774804975325237262) in development, and a committed pivot to fractionalised ownership (https://coinmarketcap.com/community/articles/6602c46dee36205ecad76300/) of Pixelmon NFTs. “You have to constantly build content and constantly increase the audience for that content,” explains Xiloyannis. “And as you go forward, you need to tighten the constraints of that content, making it more brand-centric as you find what people want. We're discovering, for example, that more and more people want Japanese-type designs. They want more 2D. They want more blood – they want Game of Thrones meets Pokemon.” Now that the Pixelmon community is getting what the Pixelmon community wants, what’s the ambition? “If at some point a tier one studio or a Tencent satellite studio wants to license our IP, that's when we're made,” Xiloyannis says with quiet assurance. “If a Japanese tier one anime studio wants to make an anime surrounding Pixelmon, that's when we're made.” You wouldn’t bet against it. Want to learn more about Beam? Twitter: https://twitter.com/BuildOnBeam Website: http://www.onbeam.cohttps://twitter.com/BuildOnBeamonbeam.comhttp://www.onbeam.com/tps://gov.onbeamhttps://docs.onbeam.com/tcircle.io/)Snapshohttps://gov.onbeam.com/com/ Telegrhttps://vote.onbeam.com///t.me/buildonbeam_ahttps://x.com/onbeamtps://t.me/buildonbeam_ann Medium: https://medium.com/@onbeam Disclaimer: This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, financial or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any digital assets and the use of finance-related terminology are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute any recommendation for any action or an offer to provide investment, financial or other advisory services. This content may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to purchase any digital asset referenced herein. There can be no assurance that the investments mentioned herein will be profitable. The digital assets referenced in this report currently face an uncertain regulatory landscape in several jurisdictions. The legal and regulatory risks inherent in referenced digital assets are not the subject of this content. The content speaks only as of the date indicated.