FIFA Rivals, Pudgy Party and more: How Mythical Games hits 100 million wallets

In the latest episode of the Blockchain Gaming World podcast, editor-in-chief Jon Jordan talks to Mythical Games’ CEO John Linden about the success of NFL Rivals, the forthcoming launch of FIFA Rivals and Pudgy Party, and how he expects to hit 100 million wallets in the next 18 months.
Let’s start off with your main game that’s live at the moment, NFL Rivals, are you happy with the way it’s shaping up?
John Linden: I think we’re going to see one, two, and three very different years in that game. Year one was about getting it out. That was a tough job and we are very proud of that. We not only got the game out, but the secondary market is fully integrated and approved by Apple and Google. That was a big step.
Year two has been good and bad. Good in the sense that we’ve seen good growth. The biggest thing we’ve seen is that secondary revenue is now over 50%. In fact, it’s closer to 65%, so up from 20% in year one.
There’s some challenges too though. Just as a game alone, it’s not an annual title where we just throw everything away from previous season and start over in the new season. That’s very different to like Madden or other sports games. We were trying to have a living economy, and that’s not easy regardless of game. We have learned what to do, and what not to do.
Now that we’re approaching Super Bowl for year two, we have an enormous plan for year three, so we’re super pumped. During the offseason and looking into next year, we’ve put a lot more emphasis on PvP, which we’re rolling out right now. We did some tests with this thing called Rivals Attack, and the reaction was amazing. We have a nearly 90% approval rating from the user base and a lot of interaction. For season 3 you’re also gonna see more around social features and how you interact with the marketplace.
Year two was tougher because we had a lot of new things we were learning, like; How do we honor your previous collection while still trying to get people to convert into the new collection?
I think season 3 is gonna be our year for that game now that we have all the fundamentals.
To that point, as you say, sports games have this seasonal structure where they wipe everything and everyone starts again from scratch. But if people have bought NFTs, it’s tricky because of the value those players. How does that work?
It’s definitely a challenge in terms of game design. It would be much easier just to wipe them and start over, but we were trying to do something different. We want those collections to be more valuable 10 years from now. We want to retain the people that have been dedicated to the game and have them feel like it’s growing, but we also want to make sure new players coming in don’t feel overwhelmed.
That’s where I give us a B minus as we had a harder time with players coming in this year.
Now that we have a good amount of data, we’ll be able to improve. We also pulled back a bit on marketing this year because of that power curve, but now that we understand it, you’ll see a massive push again going into the next season.
How has the QuickTrade feature been working out in terms of revenue?
QuickTrade is definitely at v1.0 right now. It had a huge impact on the game, but I think we can do much better. You might eventually see this AI sports agent concept, where it’s helping guide players through trading.
To me, QuickTrade is the most significant thing we’ve done in web3 because we’re mixing all of these cohorts together. In one transaction, you might have a whale and a player grinding the game that earned some mythical card. Suddenly we’re mixing the audience in a very favorable way for everybody involved.
The fact that we have 65% of our revenue coming from secondary trading, that’s waking up a lot of people.
John Linden
It’s also great for NFL Rivals because it’s encouraging transactions and trading. Obviously with games like FIFA Rivals coming out, you’re talking about a very big worldwide audience. This is where web3 really starts shining in terms of what it can do for a mainstream audience.
Thinking about your margins, QuickTrade gives you a strong business case. If I try to sell players individually, I’ll get a much better margin than selling it as part of a QuickTrade bundle. That gives you quite a lot of arbitrage.
I agree with you, and that’s where I put us at a B. Ideally, if you have a massive order book and you have enough depth in all of your bids, just like a financial FinTech product, you would use QuickTrade all the time. The problem is it varies. Somebody could be offering a Christian McGaffey card at a really high price and then two minutes later that one’s gone and the price has dropped temporarily. If you’re an active trader, it’s still best to list and suggest your own price, but the instant liquidity from QuickTrade is definitely beneficial for a lot of players.
Right now, NFL Rivals has about 50,000 open orders at any given second, which is pretty good. It’s still not big enough, we’d love it to be a million.
I think it becomes a more fair marketplace if you’re looking at it 24-7-365. But right now, there are some ebbs and flows like any marketplace, and hopefully we’ll get better with our next version.
Your biggest announcement last year was FIFA Rivals. That deal is not cheap. You’re also giving away a percentage cut of all your revenue from that, so how does that play out from a business point of view?
FIFA is awesome. NFL has been amazing. We love that league. It’s a great product because it’s mostly North American, which basically means prices are higher, and spending from the consumer base is generally higher. NFL is also starting to go more international. We’ve picked up a decent amount with the league as they start expanding into London, Frankfurt and Madrid next year, and Brazil this year. So the audience is becoming more global, which is exciting.
NFL is also an amazing organization, so we’ve re-upped our deal there recently. We’re going to be around for many years with NFL Rivals.
Obviously Madden is the incumbent. It’s sitting at about 25 million players, where we crossed into the 6.5 million territory, so there’s definitely upside. The fact that we were able to get to about 25% of the audience size of Madden after 18 months is something we’re very proud of. Madden has been around for something like 36 years. We have a long way to go, but we can definitely quadruple over time.
But if you look at it, Madden at 25 million, and the old FIFA mobile was 500 million players a year. It’s ridiculous. During a World Cup year, FIFA mobile had about 80 million players a day, that’s up there with Roblox and Fortnite.

The challenge is it’s a global audience. You have an affinity of different groups. There’s 211 football federations around the world that are part of FIFA alone, not including all the leagues, clubs, etc. Then there’s men’s, women’s, all that stuff too. It’s a huge opportunity and we’re really excited to take this one.
I would describe FIFA Rivals as a reincarnation of what we built off of NFL, but we’ve redone a lot of it. All the gameplay is PvP from your heads up. We are playing what we call an action real-time strategy, that’s definitely different to NFL Rivals. We’ve retooled the entire animation system and marketplace too. We’ll be showing some gameplay very soon.
It’s focused on esports too, as well as being on mobile. We want this to be globally accessible so anyone in the world can pick up their phone and be part of the FIFA world.
We’re the only licensed game with FIFA right now, and I think there’ll be some additional ones down the road. FIFA is definitely coordinating its next decade strategy and there’s a lot of synergies between the games it’s looking to bring out. We’re going to be a great partner in that ecosystem. Blockchain is the sort of thing FIFA is looking for, probably because what we do with NFL Rivals and the vision we laid out with them over blockchain.
They’ve had some blockchain attempts, some of them worked, some of them didn’t. But I think what they love is the ability to have digital ownership in a very convenient way, and how we did that with NFL Rivals spoke volumes. The fact that 18 months later, we’re still higher rated in both Google Play and iOS over the incumbent. One of our biggest achievements with NFL Rivals is that people like it. They like the economy side of it.
And again, there’s so many different relationships in the world of football globally that web3 can bring together. Since the announcement, we’ve had many clubs wanting to get involved. They all have a web3 and esports plan for their clubs, leagues and all the way up to FIFA. The fact we can potentially bring all that to them over the next few years is exciting. And this is a very long contract we’ve signed with them, it takes us through several World Cups.
In football pretty much everyone has crypto partners now. It’s interesting how those connections fit in directly with what you guys are doing.
Yeah, fans love crypto. It sponsors lots of leagues and teams. You have everybody from Polkadot to Tezos. Crypto.com is very active in the space. It’s opening some eyes for sure. But I think our focus right now is just to put out an amazing game that has staying power, a game our fans are interested in.
Well that’s always helpful.
We’re filling some pretty big shoes. We’re not bringing out the simulation game. We are making this over-the-top animation style arcade-style game, which is really fun and it’s looking great.
Again, if you compare it to NFL Rivals, you’ll see some common mechanics. Some of the things around our Rattles brand will stay true, that oversaturated colors, over-the-top animation, things like that. But it’s going to be a different game, and what’s great is that the learnings we’re getting in FIFA Rivals, we can bring back into NFL Rivals too.
Looking at Pudgy Party, it’s a bit more opportunistic.
We’ve been talking to Luca for many years, and Pudgy Penguins has had a couple of forays into gaming, but it was a little lackluster from what Luca wanted. We started talking about what we were doing and he’d seen what we had done with Blankos. We came up with a new game, and it’s awesome. I get this question all the time, is it going to be different than Blankos? They’ll have some common mechanics, but it is a different game. It’s very much built as a free-to-play mobile game around the Pudgy IP.
We showed it at Art Basel in Miami in December to about 300 influencers. They loved the game, which is great. We’re trying to deliver something that could appeal to that audience, but really we’re trying to appeal to the mainstream audience. The number of toys Pudgy is selling now per month is unbelievable.
Luca said a few times he wants the number one game in the world, which is very lofty, but you know what? He and the Igloo team are brilliant. What we’re going to build, some of the tournament structures we’re thinking about, and how to get influencers involved and really unlock value for the community, we’re going to deliver.
As for gameplay, that game is pretty spectacular. Now we’re just trying to finish up the rest of the meta loops and all that.
In terms of value, the Pudgy Penguins game has come about fast, and is very different from a multi-year sports contract. Hopefully that game will be there in 10 years time, but just the way these things go, it probably won’t be.
I would say, I think this game could take on Stumble Guys, to be super awkward with them. Stumble Guys just crossed 400 million consumers worldwide. The game we’re putting out will definitely be up there. Again, it’s made to be mainstream and that’s really Luca’s goal. He wants to support the community, but it’s really about expanding that community.
All of your ongoing games are mobile. Do you feel that’s where the opportunity is right now?
It is. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the Pudgy game comes out on additional platforms too. There’s a lot of interest for it in the PC and console space. No announcements yet, but I’d be shocked if that game doesn’t eventually hit beyond mobile. It’s being built so we can expand it across platforms.
FIFA Mobile will probably be dominantly mobile. We are working at how to stream that. How to have a big broadcast moment out of that so we can play on the esports angle as well. NFL Rivals is mostly mobile. With Pudgy and Blankos we want to head more cross-platform over time.
What about Nitro Nation World Tour and other third-party games coming out on the Mythos chain?
Nitro is the first third-party game in our ecosystem, it was made by CM Games. The challenge with running a platform is that you don’t have full control over that. I know Nitro had some internal stuff they were juggling. We helped them get some funding, and they’re quickly moving out of soft launch now. That game is going to grow greatly in the next few months. But again, it wasn’t really up to us. It was up to another developer, and that’s been a challenge on the platform side.
Our goal originally was to add three quality games by other developers to the Mythical platform this year. We’re probably going to sign four this month alone, so we’re making good progress.
Once FIFA Rivals and Pudgy Party are out there, we’ll be inundated with people wanting to build on the platform because they see the growth, and we already have six million wallets. I think we’ll close in on a hundred million wallets within six quarters.
Once you start having a hundred million consumer wallets on a chain that’s optimized for gaming, you’re going to see a lot of interest in that chain. With four games planned for this year, we’ve already beat our goal. We’re not trying to be Steam, we’re not trying to have 80,000 games. We want to have 10, 15, 20 games a year that are really solid, that can be played by millions of people. Games that have 10 years of life in them.
Over the years you’ve spoken about traditional games companies adopting blockchain. In 2021/22 we thought that was happening quite quickly, but obviously it didn’t. Are we there yet?
I think we’re going see more and more of that. The one common thing we have with every game that’s either signing or implementing with Mythos chain right now is they are real game developers. There’s a lot of new great web3 teams out there, but it’s not our focus right now. Our focus is on people that are viewing this as a major component of a bigger ecosystem. The difference is every one of our games that are coming out are by experienced developers.
You’re not at the Take-Two level quite yet, those guys are still several years away. There’s good and bad with the technology, but it’s accelerating at a pretty amazing pace.
There were a lot of missteps early on by some people, even the big developers that jumped in, and it’s something we’ve been trying to talk to developers about. One of the narratives people get wrong in web3 is that it’s about players being able to profit from your game. Although that’s part of it, it’s really about expressing digital identity. Like if I unlock a Travis Kelsey mythical card and it’s trading for a thousand dollars in the marketplace, you don’t see everybody rush out to sell that thousand dollar card. But you see a lot of people who’s like, my collection value just went up. That’s the biggest thing web3 will change in web2.
It’s about freedom, but also digital identity, and collection value. In fact we’re thinking about that with Mythical Marketplace a bit more, to emphasize your collection value, because that is what really matters to consumers. An open ecosystem around the value of those assets is part of that. Once we perfect that, that’s when the big developers will come in. The fact that we have 65% of our revenue coming from secondary trading, that’s waking up a lot of people.
I guess that remains one of the big issues for blockchain games. How do you separate the financial value of assets with their emotional value or just their utility in a game. Having multiple games using the same MYTH token helps for this?
Yeah, definitely. You’ll see more of that over time too I think as collections build, we’re quick trading within a game. You could easily see us quick trading across games at some point too.
That’s the first real step of interoperability when you can easily get into say a Pudgy game by trading out an NFL Rival or a Nitro Nation car to jumpstart the next game. You’ll start seeing a lot more of that.

Then another product offering is coming fairly soon that’s a bit more on the social side. It’s about how do you interact with the community? How do you interact with the marketplace and your wallet and all that. It’s beautiful that we’re in this spot now where a lot of the fundamental pieces are working. Now it’s about how do we make this a better experience and communicate that.
Even now someone could sell an NFT in NFL Rivals and cash that out to Uphold, which is your provider. Then at Uphold, you have a fiat card that you’d cash that out to within hours.
That’s exactly right. The fundamentals are there. Now let’s make that experience straightforward. I’m coming to this game. What do I have in my inventory? Oh, these I’m not really using right now. And oh, there’s value, people want those assets. I’m going to change that out for something else. I think that’s when it starts getting really fun. Now it’s just how you present that to make it easy for people.
You mentioned AI already. It’s not impossible to think an AI agent on the Mythical Market would fix a lot of these UX problems.
It’s something we’re definitely thinking about. Some of the AI agent stuff out there is very academic still, and obviously, it’s a hyped up thing, but it’s hyped up for a reason. I think it does help.
There’s people out there talking about having AI play the game for them. We’re not as interested in that personally. Games are meant to be played. But I do think AI technology and AI agents can help you understand your assets and help you get better.
You could imagine a sports agent in these games helping you to understand how to get say Ronaldo, if that’s what you want. AI guiding is more important than AI playing for you. That’s a niche that’s going to fall off, but I think AI guiding you is going to be huge.
We have some things in the works right now with AI guiding you in terms of your collection. You’ll definitely see it this year.
Check out the Mythical Market here.
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