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 thier expertise from huge successful titles like Farmville, etc. The reason Farmville shutdown was because Facebook decided to stop which lead to millions of gameplay hours/resource being lost. To avoid this, they wanted to store everything on public server, hence team chose the best public server available.... the BLOCKCHAIN Team faced various challenges while making the game fully onchain. 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 load, they saw the market gap between available tooling and tooling a dapp would need to provide best user experience. This lead team to design thier individual stack in a way that can be used by other teams. vRNG is the first of the kind with minimal latency compared to giants like Chainlink, tec. If we look at the past, Teams that see the gap and pivot, always succeeded. This is because theory is different from reality. Some examples of companies that started something and pivoted to something 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 infrastrucuture 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 "forever" game but sadly it is now dead. Why? Can't community take over? The answer is simply "NO". This is because its fu*king expensive to fund the txns of the user and no community can afford it. On top of it, team is running 2 chains... this is like 200k$+ per month... insanely expensive. So in simple terms... Game state and everything is available but no community can afford the execution/operation costs to fund the txns. So technically game is not dead but left unplayable because of operation costs either by team or the community. ---------- Thoughts on Announcement: I was asking myself... what is my endgoal? 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 thier 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 250+ founder pirate holder, i fully support this decision of pivoting to fully infra company from 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 doesn't feel its a "rug" with thier final $pirate allocation. Will be holding all my pirates, might even add more like the rares today. On the game items, I believe 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 $PIRATE token. This is actually bullish as this will lead to 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... 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 team for making this bold move to fully focus on infra rather 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!