Fat Penguin's New Exploration of NFTs

NFT has always been a track that I care about and pay attention to.

Although its overall development has been quite poor over the years, with even the once leading project Bored Ape remaining silent and gradually fading into obscurity, I still hope that this track, which once created brilliance and left me with deep memories, can rejuvenate.

Recently, Shen Chao published an article titled "When Pudgy Penguins Made a 'Non-Crypto' Game" (full text can be found in the reference link at the end), exploring a new path attempted by the NFT project Pudgy Penguins.

For many readers who follow the NFT track, Pudgy Penguins can be considered the only standout in recent years. Its massive distribution of tokens last year not only rewarded Pudgy Penguins holders but also broadly benefited many veteran players in the crypto ecosystem, marking the only instance in recent years that brought NFTs back into the spotlight.

However, the growth process of Pudgy Penguins has been full of twists and turns.

Initially, it was a top-tier project, but later it collapsed due to issues with the founder, and was taken over by the current team. After taking over, the current team did not immediately follow the popular practices in the NFT space to develop games and expand the on-chain ecosystem, but instead took a traditional IP-like offline route, developing toys and peripheral products based on its IP.

Once it regained a certain level of recognition through offline channels, it returned to the on-chain space, first issuing tokens to drive popularity, and then creating a layer 2 expansion on Ethereum, based on which it developed its gaming ecosystem.

Recently, it launched a new game called Pudgy Party on the Apple and Google stores, which even briefly made it into the top 10 of the free games chart—Shen Chao's article revolves around this game.

The biggest feature of this game is that it hardly shows any traces of Web 3; there is no wallet connection, no tokens, and no NFTs.

It doesn't promote "play-to-earn," nor does it offer "token rewards," and there are no NFT transactions. All the key elements we imagine must be present in a Web 3 blockchain game are absent here.

If a player who has never been exposed to the crypto ecosystem plays this game, they would only think of it as a casual mobile game, without considering any connection to Web 3. If a player familiar with the crypto ecosystem but not with Pudgy Penguins plays this game, they would find it hard to imagine that the team behind this game is a crypto (NFT) team.

However, it is precisely this "hidden" approach that, in my view, makes it more likely to "break the deadlock."

The brilliance of this approach lies in its departure from the obsession with forcefully pushing crypto elements to the public, instead shedding all constraints and first using the most familiar methods to let the public understand the Pudgy Penguins IP.

When this game becomes popular, and more and more traditional internet players start to chase this IP, the team can naturally inform the players that the essence of this IP comes from a crypto asset, which is specifically represented by those ten thousand Pudgy Penguins NFTs.

By that time, the Pudgy Penguins IP will have a broad audience and strong consensus. At that point, there will be no need for the team to guide or "tempt" players; the big players within the community will inevitably pursue NFTs, actively learn how to set up wallets, and search for how to enter the NFT market to buy Pudgy Penguins NFTs.

In this way, the awareness that "NFTs are 'luxury goods' and 'status symbols' in the virtual world" will naturally be established.

This is a bottom-up construction method, and this method has always been a successful way for projects in the crypto ecosystem to initiate, transmit, organize, and operate.

In fact, some well-known projects in the existing NFT ecosystem were also built through this bottom-up approach in their early stages. However, when these projects attempted to expand their value and scope, they were always burdened by "crypto," constantly thinking about where to insert "tokens" and in what scenarios to add "NFTs," leading to dissatisfaction no matter what they did, resulting in a "neither fish nor fowl" situation—if they didn't include "crypto" elements, they feared it wouldn't resemble a Web 3 game; if they included "crypto" elements, they were often met with resistance from traditional users.

Now, the new path that Pudgy Penguins is attempting may provide a new idea for the future development of NFTs.

Of course, this approach is still in its early stages, and there is still a long way to go before success. But in any case, I find this exploration very innovative; it has shed all burdens and returned to a more natural way.