Non-fungible token (NFT) project Pudgy Penguins is winding down its mobile game Pudgy Party and halting further development.

In an X post, the team said on Saturday that it would shift its gaming resources toward Pudgy World, a browser-based experience which it described as the flagship gaming product for the Pudgy Penguins ecosystem. 

“We’ve made the difficult decision to wind down Pudgy Party and halt further development,” the team wrote, adding that Pudgy World offered greater potential for scalability and introducing new users to the Pudgy Penguins brand. 

The mobile game launched in August 2025 and surpassed 500,000 downloads on Google Play alone. Pudgy Party said total downloads have exceeded 1 million.

Pudgy Penguins is consolidating its gaming ambitions around a single flagship product as the project expands beyond NFTs through initiatives spanning toys, gaming, licensing and entertainment.

Total NFT market capitalization climbed to nearly $1.5 billion on Monday from more than $1.3 billion on Friday, according to CoinGecko, but remains far below its 2022 peak of over $17 billion.

7-day NFT market capitalization data. Source: CoinGecko

Crypto games struggle to find sustainable business models 

Pudgy Party’s wind-down comes as another Web3 gaming project, Fishing Frenzy, and its developer, Uncharted, announced they would cease operations after failing to establish a viable crypto-gaming model.

“Despite our best efforts, we were ultimately unable to prove our thesis on crypto gaming and could not find product-market-business fit,” Fishing Frenzy said in an X post on Monday.

The team said the company had spent the last year testing approaches and different audiences, but had not found a path that inspired the confidence to continue. 

Related: Binance to end NFT support on exchange, shift service to wallet

Fishing Frenzy will shut down its servers on June 25 at 2:00 am UTC. The project has stopped selling USDC packages and made its FISH token spend-only and untradable.

The team said that the USDC remaining in the FISH/USDC liquidity pool would be redistributed to community members and stakers. 

Magazine: Does ‘Paper Bitcoin’ mean there’s an unlimited supply of BTC?