‘Pirate Nation’ Ethereum RPG Shutting Down as Crypto Gaming Graveyard Grows

Ethereum role-playing sport Pirate Nation is shutting down its “totally on-chain” operations, with the “greatest components of the sport” being damaged down into smaller chunks to be performed on an arcade app on the Summary community as a substitute.

In a assertion on X, Pirate Nation developer Proof of Play cited a scarcity of gamers as the first purpose for closing down the sport. The studio defined that it merely wasn’t financially viable to proceed to put money into and function the sport with out important curiosity. 

“Shutting down Pirate Nation was one of the crucial troublesome selections I’ve ever been a part of,” Adam Fern, co-founder and product lead of sport studio Proof of Play, wrote on X. “I like Pirate Nation and I spent practically seven days per week for the previous three-plus years on it, however the reality is it wasn’t ever going to be a breakout, mass market success.”

It’s vital to notice that whereas Pirate Nation is shutting down, Proof of Play will proceed constructing infrastructure and its broader ecosystem—which incorporates the aforementioned Summary-based arcade. As such, throughout the remaining two-week Pirate Nation occasion, gamers will have the ability to burn their objects in alternate for Plunder Certificates, which can unlock future rewards.

“We began Proof of Play to discover what totally on-chain video games may seem like—video games with permanence, neighborhood possession, and new forms of participant experiences. Pirate Nation was our first large step in that route, and we poured years of labor into it,” Proof of Play CEO Amitt Mahajan wrote on X.  “Whereas the enterprise causes for shifting on could also be sound, it doesn’t make the loss any simpler for many who performed, contributed, and believed within the mission.”

Proof of Play had the daring imaginative and prescient to run Pirate Nation solely through a stack of sensible contracts, which comprise the code to autonomously energy the expertise.

As such, it first struggled because the studio was compelled to pay as much as $4,000 a day to subsidize gamers’ fuel charges on Ethereum scaling community Polygon. It then migrated to Ethereum layer-2 community Arbitrum, because it launched two chains to deal with the sport’s transaction load.

Mahajan then predicted a way forward for hundreds of devoted blockchains that every help particular person purposes. Nonetheless, it seems that working a couple of blockchain was extra pricey than anticipated given the scale of Pirate Nation’s participant base.

“The fact is that working two chains not is sensible from a dollars-and-cents enterprise perspective,” the submit learn. “The demand for the totally on-chain model of Pirate Nation merely isn’t there to maintain operation indefinitely—as such, the perfect components of the sport will stay on through the Proof of Play Arcade on Summary. The arcade format permits us to deliver over totally different components of the sport over time, and even to different chains sooner or later.”

Proof of Play Arcade on Summary requires the acquisition of credit, and has to this point attracted fewer than 10,000 whole patrons, in line with Dune knowledge.

Some Pirate Nation gamers are upset by what they understand as a false promise of a sport that may by no means shut down. After elevating $33 million in 2023, Mahajan advised Decrypt that he was impressed to make use of the blockchain to design and deploy “endlessly video games,” after Zynga pulled FarmVille—a sport he helped construct—offline. The Proof of Play web site additionally highlights the significance of “serverless on-chain purposes [that] can’t be censored or shut down.”

Regardless of this, Pirate Nation was apparently nonetheless reliant on Proof of Play, and is at the moment within the strategy of being shut down. Proof of Play didn’t instantly reply to Decrypt’s request for touch upon this matter.

Sadly, Pirate Nation’s demise isn’t something new for the business, however merely the latest instance of a troubling pattern of crypto video games closing up store. This yr alone, main initiatives like Deadrop, Ember Sword, Nyan Heroes, and The Strolling Lifeless: Empires have gone offline regardless of substantial previous hype and participant funding in tokenized property.

Whereas the precise causes for video games crashing out have diversified, it normally boils right down to a scarcity of funds to proceed improvement. Gaming tokens have additionally broadly misplaced appreciable worth during the last yr, with none at the moment remaining within the prime 100 cryptocurrencies by market cap, in line with CoinGecko. Given all of that, crypto gaming vibes are in a tough place.

“It is fairly clear Web3 gaming sentiment is at a backside, lots of experiments have failed, and enterprise capital cash from final cycle has largely run out,” crypto gaming content material creator Luke Franks advised Decrypt. “Constructing video games—famously additionally within the conventional world—is onerous.”

“However that is the place you begin to see some attention-grabbing new developments—the rise of small indie groups, vibe coding video games with no funds, AI-driven mechanics that have been by no means potential earlier than,” he added, hanging a extra optimistic tone. “It is a great distance again up, but it surely begins right here.”