With the release of the Pudgy Party mobile game due imminently, it’s worth taking a step back to see how the game will fit into the wider Pudgy Penguins’ ecosystem.
The broad story is, of course, well-known with Luca Netz making a $2.5 million (750 ETH) bet acquiring what-was-then a failing NFT project in April 2022, with much of the community positioned against its co-founders.
Indeed, such was the animosity, some holders had wrapped their Pudgy Penguins, creating a new collection which could be traded on Ethereum without any of the creator royalties flowing back to the original team, notably CEO Cole Villemain.
With a background in retailing and requiring cashflow as the NFT trading boom soured, Netz’s initial move was the launch of plushies into stores such as Wal-mart, a move that paid off, generating around $500,000 in the first couple of days.
However, this was only the start. With the long term vision to make Pudgy Penguins the face of crypto, Netz and his team focused on online marketing, particularly leveraging the power of memes and gifs, to-date generating over 50 billion views. You can make your own Pudgy memes here.
And it’s this sort of activity that provides the foundation for Pudgy Party’s launch.
Netz says he wants Pudgy Penguins to be a global franchise, something that leverages the power of animation – film and TV – as well as games, physical merch and social media, all of which enables the brand to become valuable from its own activity, as well as its work with third party licensors.
In this context, Pudgy Party is just another cog in a mighty machine.
“Pudgy Party is 50% about the game and 50% about the marketing,” Netz explains.
“The game has to be good. It can’t just be about the marketing. But Mythical has developed a good game and we’re going to be bringing the marketing.”
This approach is also reflected in elements of the game design, notably the ability to create private games and tournaments; something that will feed into Pudgy Penguins’ work with high profile streamers and KOLs. There is a reason the game has the word ‘party’ in its name.
These types of social interactions are also where the game’s web3 features will be fully utilized.
Indeed, despite being launched as a mobile game, Mythical Games’ CEO John Linden says he expects it to go cross-platform, certainly on PC and perhaps on console too in the fullness of time.
And that’s the reason both Netz and Linden have high hopes for Pudgy Party.
“Stumble Guys has done 400 million downloads on mobile,” Linden points out, contextualizing his hope that Pudgy Party will be popular enough to break the 100 million.
Netz echoes, “It’s time to proliferate the penguins”.
You can pre-register for Pudgy Party on Google Play here and Apple App Store here.
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