I got a lot of DMs around this announcement as I am a big holder since early days. So sharing my candid thoughts about this BOLD&BIG move by the @PirateNation team. These are purely my thoughts, please never consider them as financial advice and always do your own research. ---------- Beginnings: Originally @ProofOfPlay started @PirateNation game bringing their expertise from huge successful titles like Farmville, etc. The reason Farmville shutdown was because Facebook decided to stop which led to millions of gameplay hours/resources being lost. To avoid this, they wanted to store everything on a public server, hence the team chose the best public server available.... the BLOCKCHAIN The team faced various challenges while making the game fully on-chain. Any normal team would have given up.... but these GOATs / CEO&CTO level team members decided to fix the problem for them and also for EVERYONE. ---------- Pivot: As the team started to handle millions of loads, they saw the market gap between available tooling and the tooling a dapp would need to provide the best user experience. This led the team to design their individual stack in a way that can be used by other teams. vRNG is the first of its kind with minimal latency compared to giants like Chainlink, etc. If we look at the past, teams that see the gap and pivot always succeed. This is because theory is different from reality. Some examples of companies that started something and pivoted to something else are: - Nintendo: Playing cards and toys → Video game consoles and IP like Mario and Zelda - Slack: Online game (Glitch) → Workplace messaging - Netflix: DVD rentals by mail → Streaming and original content - Shopify: Online snowboard shop → E-commerce platform - Instagram: Check-in and location app (Burbn) → Photo sharing In the same way... @ProofOfPlay pivoted from "Game development" company to "Game Infrastructure Service Provider" company. @PirateNation was always a "Proof" that the infrastructure services created by @ProofOfPlay actually work at scale. IMO, this was the best PIVOT I could ask for. ---------- Game that never dies: The team started with a "forever" game but sadly it is now dead. Why? Can't the community take over? The answer is simply "NO". This is because it's fu*king expensive to fund the transactions of the user and no community can afford it. On top of it, the team is running 2 chains... this is like $200k+ per month... insanely expensive. So in simple terms... the game state and everything is available but no community can afford the execution/operation costs to fund the transactions. So technically the game is not dead but left unplayable because of operation costs either by the team or the community. ---------- Thoughts on Announcement: I was asking myself... what is my end goal? Is it the game in which Founder pirates had no advantages compared to Gen1 free pirates? Or seeing "Powered by POP" everywhere? You guessed it right... seeing "Powered by POP" everywhere would create more value and will position $POP in terms of big companies like $LINK. Given that @ProofOfPlay already proved their tech stack with many customers from @AbstractChain, @ApeChainHUB, @HyperliquidX, etc... it actually made sense to cut down the fat and move fast towards the goal of seeing "Powered by POP" everywhere. Being a 250+ founder pirate holder, I fully support this decision of pivoting to a fully infra company from a gaming studio. ---------- My next actions: @ProofOfPlay always took care of the community, remember the second $pirate airdrop from season 1? So I fully believe the team will make sure holders/community don't feel it's a "rug" with their final $pirate allocation. I will be holding all my pirates, might even add more like the rares today. On the game items, I believe the team would convert them to some form which would again get $POP allocation, as a gesture to reward all the active hours/time spent playing the game. Given that @PirateNation is shutting down... this means there is ZERO Utility for the $PIRATE token. This is actually bullish as this will lead to the conversion of all the $PIRATE into $POP in some or other way. This would make the whole ecosystem simple... want exposure? stake $pirate before $POP is live.... After $POP is live... the whole focus of the team would be only on $POP... no distractions with Founder NFTs or $PIRATE token. To summarize, I fully support @amittm and the team for making this bold move to fully focus on infra rather than being a game studio. All the best to the team and looking forward to the $POP making the next big waves. Community... get ready for the revenue meta/narrative!