In summary
- Zynga, the mega mobile and casual games publisher behind FarmVille, has relinquished control of the crypto game Sugartown and its intellectual property.
- The team working on Sugartown was relaunched as a new, independent company called D20 Labs, led by former Zynga executives Matt Wolf and Tommy Ngo.
- D20 Labs announced Royal Nutz Poker Club, a game built on Coinbase’s Base chain, scheduled to launch next month.
Zynga, the mega mobile and casual game publisher behind FarmVille, has relinquished control of the crypto game Sugartown and its intellectual property. The team working on the game has now relaunched as a new independent company called D20 Labs, picking up where Zynga left off – and has already revealed a new game!
D20 Labs was co-founded and is led by Matt Wolf, formerly the VP of Web3 games at Zynga, along with former Zynga Web3 GM Tommy Ngo. By separating from the mobile game publisher, which is owned by video game giant Take-Two Interactive, Wolf said D20 Labs can dive deeper into the less corporate world of crypto gaming.
D20 Labs has already announced Royal Nutz Poker Cluba game built on Coinbase’s Base chain—an Ethereum layer-2 network—that is scheduled to launch next month with additional features and updates coming over time.
Sugartown is an IP that has a number of mini-games released under it, branded as a Web3-incentivized gaming hub; currently, two games have been released called ATH and NGMI. Royal Nutz Poker Club, while connected to Sugartown through IP and story, is considered its own distinct game, with a direction separate from the wider Sugartown project.
The new web and mobile game will allow users to participate in poker tournaments in an attempt to climb the leaderboards and win prizes. Owners of Sugartown NFTs on Ethereum, called Oras, will have access to the social poker game alongside APE token holders on ApeChain—with other communities soon to join.
But players won’t be wagering real money. D20 claims to have produced a rewards system as a result of its strategic partnerships, the first of which is with ApeChain—the Ethereum scaling network powered by ApeCoin DAO’s Arbitrum.
D20 Labs started making noise in late August. While Zynga hasn’t made any formal announcements about the move, the publisher has confirmed the switch to Decrypt.
“(D20) has assumed full ownership of the Sugartown game and Zynga’s intellectual property,” a Zynga spokesperson told Decrypt. “D20 will operate Sugartown independently of Zynga to advance the game’s vision, product, and platform, with the goal of providing a seamless experience for its owners and fans.”
When asked for more details about how power was transferred and what this means for the future of Zynga’s Web3 games, the publisher declined to comment. Take-Two, which also owns the Rockstar Games and 2K Sports brands, acquired Zynga in 2022, around the same time the developer revealed its plans to create Web3 games.
Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said at the time that the Zynga deal would provide “Web3 opportunities” that the combined company would be better equipped to address together. But now, with Zynga abandoning its Blockchain gaming IP and talent, it’s unclear whether the studio, or Take-Two in general, plan to remain involved in this space.
Following the spinoff and formation of D20 Labs, the team claimed in an unrecorded Twitter Spaces that the new company is on solid financial footing, despite not having Zynga’s backing, according to multiple sources. D20 officials declined to comment on the claims.
What has been confirmed, however, is that Royal Nutz Poker Club is the first of many planned future games from D20 Labs alongside the development of Sugartown.
Edited by Andrew Hayward
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