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.
