In the latest episode of the Blockchain Gaming World podcast, editor-in-chief Jon Jordan talks to Amitt Mahajan, the CEO of fully onchain game studio Proof of Play.
BlockchainGamer: Pirate Nation has been live for over a year now. From a CEO level, how have you found that?
Mahajan: A lot of the things that we knew we had to get done actually ended up happening. As of September 2023, I think we were on Arbitrum already or about to switch. Then we ended up launching our own chain. We hit the limits of that, and launched the second chain.
We released a ton of great features and gameplay improvements. All-time-highs on DAUs, we launched the token, the team grew. Yeah, it’s been busy.
If you were to say, you’ll make progress and you ask me to predict in what direction, I would not have predicted a lot of things that happened. But I’m just incredibly proud of what we’ve accomplished. I’m grateful to our hardworking team that has just continually broke blockchain scaling limits.
We’re the number one chain in terms of actual throughput. We have a second chain, which is right behind our first chain Apex. We’re really pushing this tech to its limits and that’s exciting.
You basically update the game every week. It’s an interesting contrast to lots of blockchain games which launch something, and then take it down after a bit, in a very stop-start fashion.
Yeah, it’s called building in public. I don’t know how many releases we’ve done now, we may be at 100 in terms of weekly updates. My view on this is that there’s really only one form of competitive advantage in this space, and that’s just the ability to ship and ship often. And a lot of it is just in conversation with our players. The goal is just to keep making the game better.
We’re actually starting to see a lot of activity now in terms of people building on top of us. So the improvements to the game are not just coming from us anymore. You have like the game itself as a protocol and people are building features on top of Pirate Nation.
For example, someone just launched a massive guild competition. What’s cool is that they just did that, without needing permission from us. The data’s all open. And there’s thousands of people engaged with this thing. For them it’s exciting too, because they’re seeing, if we build on top of a game that’s growing, we’re building together.
They benefit because they don’t have to build a product from scratch. It’s the point of onchain gaming, this idea of composability and it’s cool to see it play out.
So do you think people are building on top of it because they love Pirate Nation as a game, or because you’re known as a well-funded team who’s got a blockchain with lots of activity on it? How are you reaching out to people?
I think there’s a natural curiosity to build here. I also think people like having real players. If there was an onchain open source game with a million players, maybe they would build on top of that instead. The reason everyone builds on top of Windows or iPhone, they don’t have to go and build their own operating system. They can use an existing platform and focus on the software they’re building instead.
So we’re not doing much in terms of reaching out. In fact, we’re just way too busy trying to solve core problems and get more players into the game. I mean, not everything has been great. There was a moment where we hit the limits of our first chain and we had to introduce a waiting room. That wasn’t great, but we came out of it having a much more scalable system.
I’m really hoping we’ve started to open up our tech more. We have our editor, which we haven’t announced before. We ended up giving private data access to a bunch of our builders so that they could go in and see all the in-game data and how we work with it. We’re gonna start giving out our SDK soon.
We were developers for other people’s platforms too, so we know what good looks like. Luckily the builders that are working with us are really excited about the project. We’ve been promoting them and giving them exposure, and that’s only going to increase. We’re not even at day zero of this stuff.
I remember you talking about how you want to see people building games around space stuff and ninja stuff and zombie stuff etc. That’s obviously a bit further off, but is that still the vision?
Yeah.
But when people ask me if we’re doing more than one game, I say no, not at the moment, because I want all of our wood behind a single arrow. The classic mistake startups make is trying to do too much. I’d rather do less and do it better.
Conceptually, the game is pretty simple. Idle missions, deck-building, turn-based battles and resource crafting. Do you think it’s the blockchain features that bring people into the game or is it compelling enough in itself?
My view on games and game design is that there’s so much of it now, it’s like making a stew. You’re taking bits from different things and maybe you’re tweaking the weights of these things and how they balance. Take something like World of Warcraft, is it actually innovative? No. EverQuest and Final Fantasy 11 and all these other games came before it, but they took those elements and put them together in a unique way and simplified it.
In our game you have the collection gameplay that you see in Animal Crossing, you have the card battler, obviously inspired by Slay the Spire and other turn-based card battle games. The crafting system is a bit like Minecraft, and a bit like Genshin Impact. We took all those elements and combined them, and there’s really nothing like Pirate Nation and the way those elements are brought together.
And there is actually a bit of innovation, but on the periphery. We have this exploration feature where you take your ship and you roam around the world. Recently we made that so the randomization of the world is synchronised for everyone. So every 12 hours, the map changes and all players get the same map. So every day now players are collaborating to recreate the world maps. Because it resets every 12 hours, we can continually add and remove elements from it. So there’s all of these MMO style vibes that we’re doing. For us it’s about creating a gameplay system that gets players interacting with each other.
We have a ton of stuff that’s about to drop too. World boss two is coming soon. And those are very blockchain native features, because you have provably fair battles, perfect information on what other players are doing, how the players collaborate and compete with each other.
It’s like, if poker was a card game where everyone was playing face up, how would that change strategy? The idea is the same. For us as game designers, it’s about taking the unique properties of the platform and trying to find new and interesting decisions.
I need to check out more of the world exploration stuff…
Yeah, you’re really missing out because we have unique rewards that can only be earned through world exploration. We also recently added monsters to the map. So now, as you’re exploring, you can run into these different monsters and some of them are rare and drop rare items that can only be used in certain quests.
What’s innovative about your staking system is that you can use your staked tokens to buy in-game gems. Can you tell us more about that?
If there’s one way to define the Proof of Play team, it’s one, creative and two, very innovative in our solutions. I can’t take credit for any of those, that’s all the team. It’s very first principles. If people have something staked, they’re not gonna wanna unstake it, but they’re gonna wanna use it. Why don’t we just make it so you can just do it straight?
We also introduced the ability to re-roll your affinity. A lot of these things are from existing mobile games, but they only really work if the game is good.
If someone is playing for financial gain or whatever, yes, we have to be innovative on the blockchain side of things, but only because we have to solve the problems. But that’s not really the thing that brings people into our ecosystem long-term. All the blockchain and financialisation stuff, in my opinion, is beta. I still tell the team, our north star is to build a great game.
The PIRATE token launched in June. Is it a relief or is it this ongoing panic about whether it’s going up or down?
It’s that quote from Mad Men, Don Draper is like, don’t think about you at all, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.
Well it does matter though doesn’t it? If it went to zero that would clearly matter.
First of all, we’re not doing anything to the token price, we have no agency over it. It’s not anything that we think about. But more importantly, so let’s take blockchain and crypto out of it completely, when I think about company valuation, my company was valued at this and it was valued at this. We had down round, we had up round, whatever.
To me, that’s just a lagging indicator of whether your product is working. Did you build something people want? When I think about how I spend my time and where I focus my energy, it’s entirely around where I have agency.
Everything else, the company price, the token price, founders, PIRATE, all of that is just lagging indicators of are we making the product?
You have to make it easy to play the game. We’re not shy about the fact that at some point we’re doing a mobile app. It’s a natural place for us to go, but in order to do that, we have to be able to support a ton of users and make sure the game is mobile optimised in terms of UI and performance.
When you did the first PIRATE airdrop, you had to limit people getting into the game because there were so many trying to log in. You mentioned that you knew you would have to build more chains at some point…
Yeah, we turned off sign-ups completely. It’s a champagne problem. We were adding like 10,000 users a day, which is an amazing place to be as a developer. But not so great if you can’t service those users in a way that is up to your standards.
Did you have any idea about how many were actual users or how many were bots or did it not really matter to you?
So, bots matter. Of course there’s going to be people who are trying to exploit, people who are trying to cheat. One of the benefits of being onchain is it’s really easy to catch those people.
In fact, our community can help us find those people and it’s fine. Our team also has a history of bot detection. One of our product leads used to work at Square on security and fraud.
We know how to do this stuff, but it’s not worth talking about. We’ve slowly cut off access to folks, but the company’s not made out of how good your bot detection is. The company’s made about how good your product is.
You originally had the Apex blockchain, but about a month ago you announced your second chain Boss. Both are built on Arbitrum. Apex is currently number one in terms of gas per second, and Boss is number three, so you have two of the top three L2s.
Yeah, we’re just starting to fill up the chain. When I worked on Farmville, we had 64 databases for 300 million players. Because one database just couldn’t hold all the player data for the entire game. So we had to do what’s known as sharding, and take 300 million players and shard them across 64 databases.
We’re basically doing something similar here, where in order for us to grow the game past the limits of a single chain, we have to have multiple chains running in parallel that can talk to each other. So we have essentially built this multi-chain tag, which allows the game to be deployed to multiple chains.
So you may be on Boss and I may be on Apex, but we can still trade with each other. What people don’t realise is that we’re automatically bridging. We’ve essentially built something that has truly never existed before in the space, which is a single application with shared state running across multiple chains and the ability for those people to interact with each other. What we’ve essentially figured out is how to build a decentralised app at scale.
There’s a few more features we need to add to it for it to be feature complete. That’s going to enable things like world boss and so on. And this technology has applications outside of games. People can use this tech when we start to open source it, but we need to show that this thing works. And that’s the reason building Pirate Nation is important. It allows us the opportunity to be solve these problems. Now we have a basket of technology that can be used to build other applications.
So the Boss chain was a pretty major milestone, not just for us, but for the blockchain industry.
I imagine some people in your situation would be a bit more vocal about the data or what’s happening on these blockchains, but you’ve not really talked about how many players you’ve got or any of that stuff?
Yeah, I mean I’ve worked on games that had three hundred million players, so my bar is pretty high. The thing I geek out about is how many transactions are we doing a day onchain? Those are things that are interesting.
I will release our player numbers when we’ve had hundreds of thousands of players. Our DAU numbers are bouncing around a bit too, because we ban bots or whatever. I think we’ll talk about it when it makes sense.
Find out more about Pirate Nation via the website.
