Pudgy Party mobile game shuts down in under a year

Pudgy Penguins removed its mobile game Pudgy Party from iOS and Android app stores on Friday and stopped active development less than a year after the title’s global launch in August. The company said it will reallocate people and budget to its other game, Pudgy World.

On the game’s official X account, the team said Pudgy World “continues to grow rapidly” and described the project as “fully ours.” CEO Luca Netz told community members the company incurred multimillion-dollar losses supporting Pudgy Party; a company spokesperson later confirmed that figure.

Pudgy Party was co-developed with Mythical Games and combined an obstacle-course party format with optional NFT features that allowed players to mint and trade tokenized in-game items. Developers reported the game reached millions of downloads and attracted an active player base before the shutdown.

The closure follows several recent exits in blockchain-enabled gaming. Titles that have ended development in the past year include Deadrop, Nyan Heroes and MetalCore. The team behind Fishing Frenzy said the game will go offline on June 25 and wrote they were unable to “prove our thesis on crypto gaming” or find a viable product-market-business fit.

Pudgy World is presented as an online hangout with user-owned items tokenized on Abstract, an Ethereum layer-2 network launched by the Pudgy Penguins parent company. The company has framed Pudgy World as its primary gaming product going forward.

Mythical Games did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The PENGU token rose more than 10% on the day of the announcement to about $0.0072, while trading roughly 15% lower over the past month. Pudgy Penguins has not published a detailed timeline for winding down Pudgy Party systems or clarified the status of in-app NFTs tied to the game.