GG’s 2025 Game of the Year: Pudgy Party

Pudgy Party delivers a premium mobile gaming experience that the Pudgy Penguins team intends to make one of the franchise’s core pillars moving forward—and it is GG’s 2025 Game of the Year.

Mythical Games, the studio behind Pudgy Party and other crypto games like NFL Rivals and FIFA Rivals, said that Pudgy Party has reached 1 million installs since its September release, while maintaining a 4.9-star rating on the Apple App Store.

In doing this, Pudgy Penguins CEO Luca Netz told Decrypt that the game has acted as an onboarding tool for the popular crypto-native IP that started as an Ethereum NFT collection. In fact, he even believes a recent increase in toy sales can be attributed to the game’s release.

But these statistical and financial wins only surface if the game is genuinely good—and it really is. Pudgy Party takes the popular casual battle royale concept from hit game Fall Guys, squishes it down into a mobile format, and evolves its gameplay elements. This creates a familiar, yet expanded gameplay experience that is perfect for casual mobile gaming.

As the cherry on top, Pudgy Party gracefully interacts with third-party IPs, including the Italian Brainrot universe, as a way to both engage its core fanbase and bring new players into the ecosystem. And this is just the beginning—or so its creators claim.

“It’s brought more people into the huddle, and it’s created a product that more of our fans can enjoy and share with their family,” Netz told Decrypt. “[Once] we start scaling, the goal is that Pudgy Party lives and exists as one of our core franchise products that hopefully has 100 million plus downloads.”

The game

Pudgy Party is a free-to-play game in which up to 20 players compete against each other in mini-games, weave their way through obstacle courses, and race to the finish line in each fresh challenge. Each round, players are eliminated until one Pudgy Penguin is left standing and crowned the victor.

Where Pudgy Party evolves on the tried-and-true Fall Guys concept is by giving characters unique abilities that can be unlocked over time. Not only does this give the title a much-needed feeling of progression, but it also creates room for creativity and skill expression in an otherwise hyper-casual environment.

“We’ve kept the core loop deliberately approachable, but not shallow. The trick has been layering strategic depth without scaring newcomers off,” John Linden, CEO of Mythical Games, told Decrypt. “The abilities system has become the stealth MVP here—it gives veterans room to flex and experiment without breaking the pick-up-and-play charm that drew people in.”

To keep that balance between casual and competitive, the game introduced skill-based matchmaking so every match feels winnable, yet challenging enough to keep you queuing up. Plus, Pudgy Party keeps the gameplay fresh with regular drops of new costumes and maps.

Linden told Decrypt that its “play with friends” feature has been a major key to its success.

“It changes the entire emotional geometry of the game—matches get louder, more chaotic, and more alive,” he said. “It’s been one of the biggest drivers of long-term retention, and honestly, one of the clearest windows into how players want to experience Pudgy Party: together, laughing, trash-talking, and chasing the next win as a squad.”

In part, this feature has helped contribute to the game’s virality, with Linden claiming that almost 20% of its over 1 million installs have come directly from friend invites.

As a result, Netz believes the game has had “the same network effect” for brand awareness as the earlier release of Pudgy Penguins toys in Walmart. The only difference is that the toys cost consumers money, while the game doesn’t—in fact, it hopes to make it possible for players to get paid to play.

Targeting ‘infinite scale’

Under its hyper-casual surface, Pudgy Party is still a crypto game. Players naturally unlock a variety of wacky and fun costumes simply by playing the game. These costumes can also be leveled up, again simply by playing the game. Some of these characters can then be turned into NFTs once they’ve hit level 3, and then sold on the Mythical marketplace.

One legendary Power Pudgy NFT costume sold for $1,400 in September, while others go for much less.

As of now, this part of the game is being tempered by the Pudgy Penguins team, out of fear that overpromotion of crypto elements may scare casual players away.

“We don’t want to pour gasoline on it from a marketing perspective. Because the world is not ready for NFTs or crypto, or even blockchain en masse yet,” Steve Starobinsky, head of partnerships at Pudgy Penguins, told Decrypt. “But soon, very, very soon, we’re going to use Pudgy Party as the glue between Web3 and Web2.”

Upon launch, Pudgy Party had characters from the Italian Brainrot universe—one of the hottest meme trends of the year. This was only made possible, Starobinsky said, because of Pudgy Penguins’ finger-on-the-pulse approach to emerging culture, signing licensing deals with three entities that own the Tung Tung Tung Sahur, Tim Cheese, and Ballerina Cappuccina IPs. He added that these deals were penned approximately five months before the game rolled out, when the meme was still in its infancy.

The Pudgy team even helped organize the “first ever Italian Brainrot Broadway show,” with the NFT collection’s mascot, Pengu, featuring in the play.

Going forward, Starobinsky wants to continue partnering with “very on-trend” or even “trend-setting” IPs while adding legacy brands into the mix. As such, he’s lining up a deal with the classic slush brand Icee, due to its synergy with the cold feel of Pudgy Penguins, to implement branded costumes into the game.

That said, Pudgy Party’s makers aren’t going all-out on the costume collectibles front.

Netz told Decrypt that the game is working on improving retention, as well as the lifetime value of a user. As he said, “the math on the revenue stuff” doesn’t work yet to scale the game further. He believes this is just normal growing pains for a free-to-play title.

“I really want a world where, if you played this game—and you loved it, and you spent your time on it—that you could actually make a minimum wage,” Netz told Decrypt.

This echoes the vision set out by play-to-earn titles of old. Axie Infinity was the most impactful example of this, attracting a major player base from the Philippines, where some people played the game to earn a living in 2021 and early 2022. But the game’s crypto economy crashed, players lost their livelihoods, and the minimum wage gamer dream was left in ruins.

However, the Pudgy Penguins CEO thinks he can still make the dream a reality.

“The reason why that’s never worked in crypto—or when it has worked, it’s worked only for a couple of months—is because things had never reached infinite scale,” Netz explained. “But we have a plan that if and when this thing has 50 million, 100 million downloads, we have levers that we’ve discussed and mapped out on how to pull and make something really exciting.”