Blockchain News

Pegaxy’s Journey: A Horse Ride Through Different Markets

Pegaxy launched in the bull market and is now navigating the bear with new features, economic balances, and improved gameplay.

Keeping The Campfire Warm

Pegaxy, a horse racing simulation blockchain game built on the Polygon network, has had its share of ups and downs riding different markets since it launched in November 2021.

BSC News spoke to Corey Wilton, CoFounder of Pegaxy, during the Philippine Web3 Festival last November 15, and he shared that the team had a pretty decent strategy at the beginning of their journey of “keeping the campfire warm.” The Pegaxy team had an IDO, NFT Sale, and game launch set one week after each other. This proved to be beneficial to Pegaxy during the bull market as it gained a lot of attention for its project.

“At our peak in February 2022, we had around 220,000 daily active users and 350,000 monthly active users across around a million registered users,” Wilton shared data with BSCNews during the interview. “Right now, we’re sitting at around 20,000 monthly active users, but the game isn’t done and we haven’t done user acquisition. We’re not expecting users to stick around and we’re not bringing in any new users through marketing yet.”

Initially, the team based their economy on the old Axie Infinity dual token economy model as it worked during that time. However, history will tell us that the initial model was unsustainable, and Pegaxy’s economy suffered a similar fate to that of Axie Infinity’s, but at a much faster rate. With all that behind them, Wilton and the team look to implement their own mechanics to balance out the economy.

The Web3 And Web2 Meta

“When we launched, we believed in the Web3 meta but we missed the Web2 meta, which was the game [aspect of what we’re building],” Wilton explained. “We focused on the Web3 users and what they wanted, so we missed the Web2 part. However, in hindsight, we couldn’t have had the Web2 part at the time of launch because it takes a long time to build the game. If we waited for that, we would have missed out on [being the first] to launch the Web3 [innovations] that we did.”

Profit-sharing agreements, called scholarships, were popularized by Axie Infinity, but these were informal arrangements that happened outside the game. Pegaxy innovated by making this scholarship feature built inside the project’s ecosystem through asset rentals and automatic payouts. Pegaxy also launched analytics dashboards and other tools catering to Web3 users. Basically, the team looked at the pain points of other projects from a Web3 perspective and tried to solve them even if the game itself wasn’t necessarily finished.

Now that these Web3 tools have been built in place, the team has the resources to focus back on game development as it looks to complement its existing infrastructure with a better gameplay experience.

“We don’t have any regrets in that sense, but our strategy moving forward, especially for our other titles, will have two different ‘go-to-market’ strategies. One for Web2 and another for Web3,” the CEO of Mirai Labs reflected on his learnings. “For Pegaxy, we need to make changes on the fly so a lot of experimentation goes into that one.”

One of those experiments was cutting off the emission of their utility token, which got inflated when a lot of users joined the ecosystem. Another is the introduction of skill-based gameplay through mobile, which is slated to roll out sometime around Christmas. The team is also looking to ease some Web3 friction of going mobile by deciding which aspects of the game should be on-chain or off-chain.

“I would consider us blessed [during this bear market] as our treasury is healthy. We have about a two year runway at this moment. We’ve had some major burn over the past year, but we’re not looking to raise more funds at the moment. We’re moving quickly and ramping up production so when the attention comes back, we’re ready to go to market with a solid product,” Wilton commented on their bear market strategy.

What is Pegaxy:

Pegaxy is a play-to-earn PVP-style horse racing game where players compete for top 3 placement against 11 other racers. Each race has randomized elemental variables, which include wind, water, fire, speed, and more.

Where to find Pegaxy:

Website | Twitter | Discord | Telegram | Medium

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