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

Ethereum role-playing game Pirate Nation is shutting down its “fully on-chain” operations, with the “best parts of the game” being broken down into smaller chunks to be played on an arcade app on the Abstract network instead.

In a statement on X, Pirate Nation developer Proof of Play cited a lack of players as the primary reason for closing down the game. The studio explained that it simply wasn’t financially viable to continue to invest in and operate the game without significant interest. 

“Shutting down Pirate Nation was one of the most difficult decisions I’ve ever been part of,” Adam Fern, co-founder and product lead of game studio Proof of Play, wrote on X. “I love Pirate Nation and I spent nearly seven days a week for the past three-plus years on it, but the truth is it wasn’t ever going to be a breakout, mass market success.”

It’s important to note that while Pirate Nation is shutting down, Proof of Play will continue building infrastructure and its broader ecosystem—which includes the aforementioned Abstract-based arcade. As such, during the final two-week Pirate Nation event, players will be able to burn their items in exchange for Plunder Certificates, which will unlock future rewards.

“We started Proof of Play to explore what fully on-chain games could look like—games with permanence, community ownership, and new types of player experiences. Pirate Nation was our first big step in that direction, and we poured years of work into it,” Proof of Play CEO Amitt Mahajan wrote on X.  “While the business reasons for moving on may be sound, it doesn’t make the loss any easier for those who played, contributed, and believed in the project.”

Proof of Play had the bold vision to run Pirate Nation entirely via a stack of smart contracts, which contain the code to autonomously power the experience.

As such, it first struggled as the studio was forced to pay up to $4,000 a day to subsidize players’ gas fees on Ethereum scaling network Polygon. It then migrated to Ethereum layer-2 network Arbitrum, as it launched two chains to handle the game’s transaction load.

Mahajan then predicted a future of thousands of dedicated blockchains that each support individual applications. However, it appears that operating more than one blockchain was more costly than expected given the size of Pirate Nation’s player base.

“The reality is that running two chains no longer makes sense from a dollars-and-cents business perspective,” the post read. “The demand for the fully on-chain version of Pirate Nation simply isn’t there to sustain operation indefinitely—as such, the best parts of the game will live on via the Proof of Play Arcade on Abstract. The arcade format allows us to bring over different parts of the game over time, and even to other chains in the future.”

Proof of Play Arcade on Abstract requires the purchase of credits, and has thus far attracted fewer than 10,000 total buyers, according to Dune data.

Some Pirate Nation players are upset by what they perceive as a false promise of a game that will never shut down. After raising $33 million in 2023, Mahajan told Decrypt that he was inspired to use the blockchain to design and deploy “forever games,” after Zynga pulled FarmVille—a game he helped build—offline. The Proof of Play site also highlights the importance of “serverless on-chain applications [that] cannot be censored or shut down.”

Despite this, Pirate Nation was apparently still reliant on Proof of Play, and is currently in the process of being shut down. Proof of Play did not immediately respond to Decrypt’s request for comment on this matter.

Unfortunately, Pirate Nation’s demise isn’t anything new for the industry, but simply the most recent example of a troubling trend of crypto games closing up shop. This year alone, major projects like Deadrop, Ember Sword, Nyan Heroes, and The Walking Dead: Empires have gone offline despite substantial past hype and player investment in tokenized assets.

While the exact reasons for games crashing out have varied, it usually boils down to a lack of funds to continue development. Gaming tokens have also broadly lost considerable value over the last year, with none currently remaining in the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market cap, according to CoinGecko. Given all of that, crypto gaming vibes are in a rough place.

“It’s pretty clear Web3 gaming sentiment is at a bottom, a lot of experiments have failed, and venture capital money from last cycle has largely run out,” crypto gaming content creator Luke Franks told Decrypt. “Building games—famously also in the traditional world—is hard.”

“But this is where you start to see some interesting new developments—the rise of small indie teams, vibe coding games with no budget, AI-driven mechanics that were never possible before,” he added, striking a more optimistic tone. “It’s a long way back up, but it starts here.”