'Pirate Nation' Ethereum RPG Shutting Down as Crypto Gaming Graveyard Grows – Decrypt

Briefly
Ethereum role-playing sport Pirate Nation is about to close down in September, together with its blockchain networks.
Developer Proof of Play stated that it is too pricey to help given a comparatively small participant base.
Quite a few crypto video games have shut down already in 2025, together with Deadrop and Nyan Heroes.
Ethereum role-playing sport Pirate Nation is shutting down its “totally on-chain” operations, with the “greatest elements of the sport” being damaged down into smaller chunks to be performed on an arcade app on the Summary community as an alternative.In a press release on X, Pirate Nation developer Proof of Play cited a scarcity of gamers as the first cause for closing down the sport. The studio defined that it merely wasn’t financially viable to proceed to spend money on and function the sport with out important curiosity. “Shutting down Pirate Nation was probably the most troublesome choices 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 almost 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 essential 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, through the last two-week Pirate Nation occasion, gamers will be capable of burn their gadgets in change for Plunder Certificates, which can unlock future rewards.
Pirate Nation: The Subsequent Chapter
It’s been an awfully busy time right here at Proof of Play. For the previous few years we’ve shipped lots of of weekly updates and proved our tech in Pirate Nation. Our staff has grown and advanced, added a completely new line of enterprise with vRNG…
— Pirate Nation (@PirateNation) August 18, 2025“We began Proof of Play to discover what totally on-chain video games might appear to be—video games with permanence, neighborhood possession, and new kinds 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 transferring on could also be sound, it doesn’t make the loss any simpler for many who performed, contributed, and believed within the challenge.”Proof of Play had the daring imaginative and prescient to run Pirate Nation totally 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’ gasoline 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 1000's of devoted blockchains that every help particular person functions. Nevertheless, 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 operating two chains now not is sensible from a dollars-and-cents enterprise perspective,” the publish learn. “The demand for the totally on-chain model of Pirate Nation merely isn’t there to maintain operation indefinitely—as such, one of the best elements of the sport will dwell on through the Proof of Play Arcade on Summary. The arcade format permits us to deliver over totally different elements 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 up to now 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 instructed 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 website additionally highlights the significance of “serverless on-chain functions [that] can't be censored or shut down.”Regardless of this, Pirate Nation was apparently nonetheless reliant on Proof of Play, and is presently 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 trade, however merely the latest instance of a troubling development of crypto video games closing up store. This yr alone, main tasks like Deadrop, Ember Sword, Nyan Heroes, and The Strolling Useless: 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 various, it often boils all the way down to a scarcity of funds to proceed growth. Gaming tokens have additionally broadly misplaced appreciable worth during the last yr, with none presently remaining within the high 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, a variety of experiments have failed, and enterprise capital cash from final cycle has largely run out,” crypto gaming content material creator Luke Franks instructed Decrypt. “Constructing video games—famously additionally within the conventional world—is tough.”“However that is the place you begin to see some fascinating new developments—the rise of small indie groups, vibe coding video games with no price range, AI-driven mechanics that had been by no means doable earlier than,” he added, putting a extra optimistic tone. “It is a great distance again up, however it begins right here.”GG NewsletterGet the newest web3 gaming information, hear instantly from gaming studios and influencers masking the house, and obtain power-ups from our companions.