Pirate Nation Studio Proof of Play Shuts Down, Open-
The studio released the Pirate Nation Unity app and smart contracts on GitHub and put its artwork, IP and Founder Pirates NFTs into the public domain under a CC0 license.
By:The Defiant Team•
NFTs & Web3
Proof of Play, the studio behind the fully onchain game Pirate Nation, said on Tuesday that it is ceasing operations, telling players it “couldn’t build a product and sustainable business that proved out this thesis at scale.”
The thesis, the studio said, was that “games using blockchain tech had the potential to usher in a new, decentralized internet.”
Proof of Play said it is open-sourcing “as much of our code and art as possible so it can be helpful to future builders & agents,” publishing the Pirate Nation Unity app, the game’s smart contracts and an internal agent workflow tool on GitHub. It is releasing the Founder Pirates NFTs and Pirate Nation artwork, intellectual property and logos under a CC0 license, which waives copyright and places the work in the public domain.
That release is visible on the piratenation-art repository, described as an “Art archive for the Pirate Nation fully onchain game” and published under a CC0-1.0 license, with folders for Combat Cards, Founder’s Pirate NFT, Logos and Voxel Game Assets.
Game developer AzFlin, reacting to the shutdown, wrote that Proof of Play “CC0’d all their artwork and 3d models,” calling it a “bunch of gold in there you can use for your own games” and pointing to a giant squid model in the voxel asset files.
PIRATE Token
The PIRATE token traded at about $0.001285 on Wednesday up 10% over 24 hours, paring back 7-day losses to 11%. Its circulating market capitalization stood near $940,000, with a fully diluted valuation of about $1.3 million. The token is down about 99.7% from its all-time high of $0.4757, set on July 18, 2024, weeks after Pirate Nation’s token launch
Proof of Play said the Pirate Nation Foundation is independent from the studio, will continue supporting PIRATE, and will keep its website operational. Proof of Play points, the studio said, “will not be redeemable for anything.”
Shiba Story Go!, the studio’s other game, “has been acquired by a 3rd party and will continue to operate independently,” Proof of Play said. It did not name the buyer.
Before the public post, the studio told its community in an internal channel message timestamped 1:32 p.m., posted under the handle “Pirate Captain Amitt,” that it was shutting down, opening with “Some sad news today” and repeating the same explanation. The message was screenshotted by Steve Bark, who wrote that it “was a bummer to read.”
Proof of Play, founded by former Zynga executives, raised venture funding to build Pirate Nation as a fully onchain game and in 2024 said it would launch a second blockchain to handle the game’s transaction volume. Its wind-down follows other retrenchments in web3 gaming, including Yield Guild Games’ decision to sunset its YGG Play publishing unit and cut 35 jobs.
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