What is this Kintara MMO and why is it pumping?
SIDELINED NEWS 165
It’s been a little while, but we’re back with another newsletter…enjoy
TLDR :
Fishing Frenzy goes under
The Pudgy Party is over
Kintara MMO makes waves
🗞️ NEWS
FISHING FRENZY GOES UNDER
Just yesterday, Uncharted and Fishing Frenzy (FF) announced that they will shut down and cease operations: “Despite our best efforts, we were ultimately unable to prove our thesis on crypto gaming and could not find product-market-business fit.”
The team added that it tried to test multiple directions and audiences (e.g., Poker, fantasy sports, and even casual Web2 gamers), but the results weren’t convincing enough to move forward
The messaging is honest, transparent, and was followed by a shutdown plan, including:
Opensourcing the Karma Score (reputation system), redistributing all USDC from its LP pool to the community and stakers, refunding USDC to players (since CH. 3), and distributing its PoD rewards to the community
Moreover, Uncharted will be returning the remaining funds to investors
In a separate post, Derek (one of the co-founders) added some context to the announcement through the lens of Uncharted’s original thesis:
“Uncharted originally began with the assumption that there was a large and growing market of crypto natives who would be happy to risk and lose money for financial entertainment.”
“Neither of these assumptions proved true: crypto and crypto gaming are both shrinking markets, and crypto natives are not consumers but are investors - meaning they churn if they are unprofitable, no matter how fun the experience is.”
Some of my own findings/readings have confirmed these statements:
The # of onchain users has declined significantly over the past 1.5y
With that, crypto gaming has become a tiny slice of a smaller pie
Pixels’ data showed that 98.8% of spenders are also extractors
Onchain data suggests that risk2earn games struggle to retain players
However, I don’t fully agree with the fact that users (always) churn if they are unprofitable. Look at how small the % of winners is at prediction markets, casinos, and TCG products, and yet these are some of the largest verticals in crypto today
Interestingly, FF had “impressive” numbers (on paper), with over 10M downloads, 25K DAU, and over 1M downloads as of late 2025. However, it’s obvious that the player data were “vanity metrics”, driven (and skewed) by Telegram and bots, rather than by genuine player activity
The onchain data that paints a more realistic picture (~1,500 returning wallets p/d as of 1 January 2026) of player activity shows that post-airdrop, the # of returning wallets and the # of new wallets declined. A typical pattern that we see in crypto
And maintaining a game with a 1-2K DAU, which of a tiny percentage is willing to spend for “entertainment value,” is not sustainable
On this topic, Dith calls these onchain games “cupcake shop business in the best of times”, which can only exist because of a combination of a) good market conditions, b) first months of launch, c) chain subsidies, and d) pre-TGE hype
Furthermore, he adds that there are only 2 paths forward to succeed:
Be the first one to achieve PMF, and be able to scale over a longer period, with the assistance of a-d
Leverage an onchain game as a wedge to build a larger ecosystem (like what Gigaverse is doing with transmedia)
Overall, Uncharted gave crypto gaming a good shot, with multiple products (Gangster Arena, Blast Balloon, FF, etc.), a scrappy approach to game development (single game loop → RPG), and interesting ideas (like the Karma Score)
However, it couldn’t succeed because the game wasn’t attractive enough for the audience beyond crypto gaming (e.g., fantasy sports), nor was it for an audience of traditional gaming
Lastly, I want to insert this quote from JW (Nov, 2025), and leave it as some food for thought:
“The perfect Web3 game is a game that Web3 natives like and enjoy and play, and usually it’s a game that embraces a lot of crypto’s ethos, but there’s a pathway to a larger audience”
THE PUDGY PARTY IS OVER
In other (unfortunate) news. Pudgy Party (PP) announced it’s shutting down the game and halting further development. Some of the phrases worth highlighting from this announcement:
“We are incredibly proud of what Pudgy Party achieved: launching at #1 on the App Store, building a large daily player community, reaching over 1 million downloads, and most importantly, helping spread the Pudgy IP far and wide”
“That said, we have seen that Pudgy World is on track to surpass these milestones and go even further…” and “We are going all-in on Pudgy World to make it the easiest, most fun entry point into the Pudgy Penguins story through gaming”
Interestingly, the announcement doesn’t go into why PP failed, but frames it more as changing its focus and resources to Pudgy World instead
So, why is the game shutting down? Well…it just wasn’t that successful. According to SensorTower data, the game had fewer than 5K downloads and $5K revenue in the last month (App Store and Play Store)
In crypto, when incentives are involved, download numbers can provide a distorted picture of genuine engagement. Like in the example of Fishing Frenzy, high download numbers mean little if the players aren’t spending
Reaching #1 in the App Store for a gaming app also “only” requires 93,000 daily downloads (SensorTower), which is an impressive feat, but less so with the inclusion of incentives and bots
From a traditional gaming perspective, building “another Fall Guys, but with the Pudgy Penguins IP” was a risky decision, as the genre peaked during COVID and has declined in popularity since
What’s also important here to add is that PP was developed by Mythical Games, and Pudgy World is developed in-house. The success of Mythical’s model, centered around building games with licensed IP, can be questioned…
NFL Rivals (silently) winded down a couple of months ago, FIFA Rivals is scaling in downloads, but revenue lags, and PP has shut down
I believe that the license fees are just eating into their margins too much, and they can’t scale profitably. But that’s just my outsider view
Speaking of IPs, another point to bring up here is whether the productization of NFT-based IPs is working. In the majority of cases, the collections are much more successful than the derivative products themselves
The decision to shut down the game seemed two-sided, stemming both from the underperformance of PP and Mythical “underdelivering” from Igloo’s perspective
Marcello, who attended one of Pudgy Penguins’ Huddles (AMAs), added some context:
“basically too much was spent on Pudgy Party for what was originally promised by Mythical, especially for the results that were brought. whereas, Pudgy World built in house is pulling 20k DAU with barely even trying compared to pudgy party, so they decided to focus more on that instead”
On the topic of incentives, PP had a vibrant skin market (at one point). The rarest skin, the “Power Pudgy,” went for ~$5,000 at its peak (only available through exclusive drops). Players were able to obtain most skins through gameplay and trade them on the Mythical Market
In response to a post about trading the skins last September, Luca Netz posted: “I have a theory that if you played Pudgy Party full-time, you could make more than a minimum-wage job”
This early Axie-esque statement (that aged like warm milk) surely attracted more of the P2E-familiar players
Overall, PP didn’t bring enough novelty to the table (there are a lot of Fall Guy clones), and the Pudgy IP couldn’t carry its success beyond the initial wave of players
WHAT’S GOING ON WITH KINTARA?
Kintara is a new P2E game that has been making headlines on CT recently due to the pump of its $KIN token to a ~$18M FDV. Today, we’ll try to dissect the why, what, and how behind its success (for now)
The game and its $KIN token launched last May as a Pump.fun project, but only started taking off last week. However, whether the recent hype is “organic” is questionable, as multiple memecoin accounts started shilling the token around last week (incl. Ansem). So, some might say it’s a “cabal coin”
For the above reasons, it was able to expand beyond the typical crypto gaming audiences (like Fishing Frenzy wasn’t able to, for example)
Raiden also made a good point on why $KIN is doing well compared to the tokens of “typical” crypto games: “it's because those holders only need a "why" - why buy and hold a (meme)coin: a thesis and "omg a memecoin wrapped under a gamified exp"?? "the next axie!!" so cool, let's moon that!”
“Cabaling” aside, let’s take a better look at what the game and its mechanics are:
Kintara is a (minimal) browser-based MMORPG in which players gather resources, fight monsters, craft items, and trade with others
The game is nothing special, but it’s “fun” because it’s financialized
“Kintara is a simple game where you can easily make money.”
To enter the game, players need to hold at least 1000 $KIN (~$13)
In summary, the P2E-economy revolves around gathering resources and earning in-game gold. Gold, items, and resources are sold in $KIN on the marketplace to others. Demand for these is created because it accelerates progression = more in-game earnings → more $KIN
So, the “Ponzi” will last as long as $KIN retains its value. Ultimately, the question is not if, but when the chart nukes
I might sound sidelined (because I am), but there’s not much novel being done here. It’s the same old story we’ve seen in crypto gaming countless times. The wrapper is just slightly more interesting than the average Ponzi
On the other hand, the game lasted longer than the typical Ponzi, and the devs continue to ship. So, maybe it has another few weeks instead of days
Next to that, it’s interesting to see a fairly rich UGC layer around the game, including guides, strategies, and earnings
Overall, Kintara is “succeeding” because it rides on an interesting narrative of having “Axie potential”, fueled by players posting how much they’re earning. And at the same time, breaking out of the typical crypto gaming bubble
But what’s concerning here is that the token chart feels manipulated, and the economy design still depends on Ponzi mechanics
🆕ALPHA CORNER
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