Although Pudgy Penguins CEO Lucas Netz boasted on Twitter in December about "1M+ downloads today. 10M+ downloads soon." he later admitted interest in the game had quickly died off. In a community call to announce the game's shutdown, Netz acknowledged that within months of the launch, there were only 200–300 active players. The project had lost the company millions of dollars, he confessed.
Pudgy Penguins shuts down Pudgy Party NFT game after losing millions in less than ten months
The Pudgy Penguins NFT brand announced it would be shutting down its Pudgy Party NFT games less than ten months after its launch. The game was a mobile battle royale game, but built on crypto rails, with NFTs used for in-game items and characters that players could buy and sell. Pudgy Penguins seemed aware that the crypto aspect would be off-putting to many players, telling Decrypt in December 2025 that they were downplaying the crypto side of things "because the world is not ready for NFTs or crypto, or even blockchain en masse yet. But soon, very, very soon, we're going to use Pudgy Party as the glue between Web3 and Web2."