Luke Barwikowski, X Hall of Flame
2024.12.31 11:33
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The original concept for Pixels, one of the most popular Web3 games on the planet, came to its founder after he ditched his comfy tech job in his early 20s to travel and work in New Zealand.
“I wanted to mess my life up a little bit, so I moved to New Zealand,” Luke Barwikowski tells Hall of Flame.
Barwikowski, who holds a double degree in computer science and Economics, worked as a software engineer in San Francisco and felt like he “had too much figured out for a 23-year-old.”
Now 28 and based in Miami, Barwikowski says his time in New Zealand was a blur of odd jobs — working on a dairy farm, a surf hostel and eventually crewing on a sailboat — all while juggling the early days of building Pixels.
A week before he was supposed to sail from New Zealand to Fiji, he was accepted into a startup accelerator for Pixels
“I talked to the guy I was working with on the startup accelerator side and said I have this cool opportunity to sail from New Zealand; is it cool if I start like a week later?”
He went on his sailing adventure, not knowing that just a few years later, Pixels — a laid-back game with over 2 million daily users — would hit a fully diluted value of nearly $2.65 billion. It did so in February of this year.
But it wasn’t all smooth sailing, pun intended.
(X/Luke Barwikowski)
He says he wasn’t great at the whole fundraising side of things, so for the first year, he bootstrapped the game with his own savings. Later on, he convinced a couple of investors to back him, but still, building a game isn’t cheap, and that funding ran out pretty quickly.
At one point, he was down to just $25,000 — barely enough to keep the company afloat for two more months.
He was skimming it close to the line, but Pixels then managed to score $2.4 million in a funding round led by Animoca Brands in 2022, and that turned out to be a game-changer for Barwikowski.
“I had $200 in my personal bank account, $800 in the business bank account, and the next day, like a million dollars in the bank account,” he laughs.
How did Luke Barwikowski grow his X following?
Barwikowski boasts 39,500 followers on his account and approximately 321,200 followers on the Pixels account.
Barwikowski says the rise in followers across the board hasn’t been due to a change in content; it’s more just the game’s popularity and regular interaction with the gamers.
(X/Luke Barwikowski)
“I’ve been posting the same kind of content ever since I started,” he says.
“It was a lot more cringe when there were 600 followers than now,” he laughs.
Barwikowski shares tons of Pixels content, runs weekly AMAs with users, and stays really active in the community, so gamers feel like they actually know him.
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“We’ve taken a build-in public approach since day one,” he says.
What content does Luke Barwikowski do?
Barwikowski likes to use his X account to provide insights into the fundamentals of Web3 gaming.
“What’s working and what’s not mainly,” he says.
(X/Luke Barwikowski)
Barwikowski knows that Pixels is one of the few Web3 games with a live token economy that’s been up and running for a while, so he’s always down to share what he’s learned with other Web3 game devs.
“We have a lot of unique insights on how to make it work best. We’re not trying to gate-keep any of that information.”
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Barwikowski doesn’t mind sharing what he knows — he believes the more skilled people in the space, the better the whole thing grows.
“I also tweet some of this stuff to give warnings on the market, too,” he says.
“We talk a lot about both prevention and detection; I want to make sure that people in the space who are making decisions also know how to evaluate games properly,” he adds.
Luke Barwikowski predictions?
Barwikowski thinks the crypto market’s been ignoring the fundamental projects lately, but he feels a “general shift” is coming soon.
“I feel like the infrastructure plays are mispriced,” he says.
He says that application layers will start taking dominance in 2025.
He gives a shoutout to Pudgy Penguins for their smooth token listing on Dec. 17 and hopes more projects can pull off something as smooth as PENGU in 2025.
“I think they had an amazing launch and did everything right.”
“I don’t think people realize this, but having a successful token listen is really, really hard,” he says.
“I think they did a really good model of making sure that the float was out there, but then team incentives are aligned too. Basically, the only locked tokens were around the team for that launch, which is great; I love that model.”
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Ciaran Lyons
Ciaran Lyons is an Australian crypto journalist. He’s also a standup comedian and has been a radio and TV presenter on Triple J, SBS and The Project.
