Zynga’s Crypto Gaming Team Just Spun Out and Revealed a New Game

Zynga, the mega mobile and casual game publisher behind FarmVille, has relinquished control of the Sugartown crypto game and its IP. The team that was 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 brand new game.

D20 Labs was co-founded and is led by Matt Wolf, formerly the VP of Web3 gaming at Zynga, alongside ex-Zynga Web3 General Manager Tommy Ngo. By breaking off from the mobile gaming publisher, which is owned by gaming giant Take-Two Interactive, Wolf said that D20 Labs is able to dive deeper into the decidedly less-corporate world of crypto gaming.

“Our recent independence from Zynga is historic, and positions D20 Labs as uniquely qualified to push the boundaries of video game innovation given our Web2/Web3 hybrid DNA,” Wolf told Decrypt.

D20 Labs has already announced Royal Nutz Poker Club, a game built on Coinbase’s Base chain—an Ethereum layer-2 network—that is set to launch sometime 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 games hub strapped with Web3 incentives—currently two games have been released called ATH and NGMI. Royal Nutz Poker Club, while connected to Sugartown through IP and lore, is considered to be its own distinct game, with direction agnostic to the broader Sugartown project.

The new web and mobile game will allow users play in poker tournaments in an attempt to climb the leaderboard and win prizes. Owners of Sugartown NFTs on Ethereum, called Oras, will get access to the social poker game alongside holders of APE tokens on ApeChain—with other communities soon to be onboarded.

But players won’t be wagering real cash. D20 claims to have produced a rewards system as the result of its strategic partnerships, the first of which is with ApeChain—the Arbitrum-powered Ethereum scaling network from the ApeCoin DAO.

D20 Labs made its first rumblings in late August. While Zynga made no formal announcement about the move, the publisher did confirm the move to Decrypt.

“[D20] has taken full ownership of the Sugartown game and IP from Zynga,” a spokesperson for Zynga told Decrypt. “D20 will operate Sugartown independent of Zynga to further the game, product, and platform vision, with the goal of providing an uninterrupted experience for its holders and fans.”

When asked for more details on how power was transferred and what this means about the future of Web3 gaming for Zynga, 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 that the developer first revealed its plans to create Web3 games.

Strauss Zelnick, CEO of Take-Two, said at the time that the Zynga deal would provide “Web3 opportunities” that the combined company would be better suited to tackle together. But now with Zynga dropping its blockchain gaming IP and talent, it’s unclear whether the studio—or Take-Two broadly—plans to play in this space any longer.

Following the spinout and formation of D20 Labs, according to multiple sources, the team said on an unrecorded Twitter Spaces that the new company has a healthy runway despite no longer being supported by Zynga. D20 leadership declined to comment on these 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