Ethereum NFT brand Pudgy Penguins has expanded from tokenized profile photos (PFPs) to plush toys at major retailers and beyond – and will then enter the mobile gaming world via a new partnership with publisher Mythical Games.
Billed as an “AAA” mobile game, the Pudgy Penguins title will debut in 2025 on the Mythos Chain, a Polkadot-based gaming network led by Mythical Games. The studio is the developer behind games like NFL Rivals and Blankos Block Party.
John Linden, co-founder and CEO of Mythical Games, shared Declutter‘s GG said the studio had been talking to Pudgy Penguins CEO Luca Netz for almost a year about creating a mobile gaming experience around the fast-growing Web3 brand.
“With our success with Blankos and more recently with NFL Rivals, which now has more than 5 million gamers, we felt like this was the perfect time,” said Linden. “Our experiences have refined our perspective on mainstream game development and made it attractive to mainstream gamers, and we’re at a point where we’re really seeing stronger Web3 use cases in mainstream games.”
Mythical Games is actively rebuilding the play-and-make Blankos Block Party PC gaming experience for mobile, and Linden told Declutter‘s GG that the same game engine will also be used to power the upcoming Pudgy Penguins game.
Pudgy Penguins is currently building out its web-based Pudgy World game on the 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 brought in more than $10 million in sales for the toy in less than a year, is part of the reason why Linden thinks Pudgy Penguins is ripe for a mobile game that could potentially can reach mass.
“To me, Pudgy Penguins is the most important Web3 IP for mainstream use,” 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 taken their brand to the masses and have become the only triple threat in Web3 Created: NFTs, Retail, And social.”
The Polkadot-powered Mythos 2.0 network is almost 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 among the top 300 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization.
The Mythos Foundation, which supports the network, has lined up a number of key contributors, including Assassin’s Creed publisher Ubisoft, South Korean gaming company Com2uS, major crypto investor Animoca Brands and esports giants such as 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 provide a high-quality gaming experience with them should be incredibly valuable to their community, as well as bringing millions of additional players to Mythos,” said Linden. “This is exactly the formula we look for in new partners, and we believe this will significantly increase usage over the coming year, driving our wallet, transaction volume and sales volume on Mythos to even greater levels.”
Edited by Stacy Elliott.