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Ethereum NFT brand Pudgy Penguins has expanded from tokenized profile pictures (PFPs) to plush toys in major retailers and beyond—and next it’ll enter the mobile gaming world via a new collaboration with publisher Mythical Games.
Billed as a “AAA” mobile game, the Pudgy Penguins title is set to debut in 2025 on the Mythos Chain, a Polkadot-based gaming network that was spearheaded by Mythical Games. The studio is the developer behind games like NFL Rivals and Blankos Block Party.
John Linden, co-founder and CEO at Mythical Games, told Decrypt’s GG that the studio had been talking with Pudgy Penguins CEO Luca Netz for nearly a year about creating a mobile gaming experience around the burgeoning Web3 brand.
“With our success with Blankos and more recently with NFL Rivals, which is now north of 5 million gamers, we felt like this was the perfect time,” said Linden. “Our experiences have fine-tuned our perspective on developing mainstream games and appealing to mainstream gamers, and we’re at a point where we are truly seeing more strong Web3 use cases in mainstream games.”
Mythical Games is actively rebuilding the play-and-create Blankos Block Party PC gaming experience for mobile, and Linden told Decrypt’s GG that the same game engine will be harnessed to power the upcoming Pudgy Penguins game as well.
Pudgy Penguins is currently building out its web-based Pudgy World game on Ethereum layer-2 scaling network zkSync. People who purchase Pudgy Penguins toys—which are sold at major retailers like Walmart, Target, and Amazon—can unlock free NFT collectibles that can be used in Pudgy World as in-game customizations.
That mainstream crossover success for the NFT brand, which yielded more than $10 million worth of sales for the toys in less than a year, is part of why Linden thinks Pudgy Penguins is ripe for a mobile game that can potentially reach the masses.
"To me, Pudgy Penguins is the most important Web3 IP for mainstream usage,” he said. “The work they have done in retail, in particular, is remarkable and growing rapidly. From Amazon to now, Walmart and Target, they have really brought their brand to the masses and have created the only triple threat in Web3 to date—NFTs, retail, and social.”
The Polkadot-powered Mythos 2.0 network is nearly live, Linden said, amid a migration from an Ethereum Virtual Machine-based approach. The network now has nearly 800,000 active wallets, he said, while CoinGecko data puts the MYTH token in the top 300 cryptocurrencies overall by market cap.
The Mythos Foundation supporting the network has lined up a number of major contributors, including Assassin’s Creed publisher Ubisoft, South Korean gaming firm Com2uS, major crypto investor Animoca Brands, and esports giants like FaZe Clan and Gen.G. Pudgy Penguins is the latest to join the group as this game with Mythical takes shape.
“Adding Pudgy Penguins to the Foundation and being able to deliver a high-quality game experience with them should be incredibly valuable to their community, and also bring millions more players to Mythos,” Linden said. “This is exactly the formula we look for in new partners, and we believe this will grow utilization in a major way over the next year, taking our wallets, transaction volume, and sales volume on Mythos to an even bigger level.”
Edited by Stacy Elliott.