Over the last few months, Proof of Play‘s Pirate Nation has grabbed significant mindshare within the Web3 gaming sector. Led by one of the key minds behind Farmville and backed by $33M in funding, the team’s successful product-centric GTM campaign will likely impact how other Web3 teams approach their pre-TGE strategy. By strongly prioritizing in-game activity over pure social farming, the team increased the number of daily active users (DAU) by 2400% over the last three months, making it one of the fastest-growing Web3 games in 2024.

Despite the niche nature of fully on-chain games (FOCG) and the many uncertainties surrounding the future growth of the genre, Pirate Nation’s popularity has attracted significant amounts of liquidity in anticipation of the launch of the company’s FOCG infrastructure layer called the Proof of Play Ecosystem. While the NFT floor price is now sitting around 1.1 ETH ($2800) – a 3500% YoY increase in dollar terms – the token has shown strong performance since its launch in June. Driven by attractive staking incentives and a growing player base, the $PIRATE token is now up over 50% after launching at around $0.12 in June 2024.

 The Importance of Playable Products

The recent trend of mediocre gaming token launches seems like it is slowly coming to an end. While many launches from earlier this year are down 50% or more from TGE, Pirate Nation has outperformed most by leveraging a tangibl