Farmville developers announce first NFT game

Three farm animals, a mysterious city and lots of NFTs: one of the biggest mobile game makers is venturing into Web3.

Zynga is stepping into Web3 with the mobile game called: Sugartown. The company announced this during a conference in San Francisco, the GamesBeat Summit. The game is built on the Ethereum blockchain and will combine "traditional" gameplay with Web3 mechanics.

The story of Sugartown revolves around three farm animals who accidentally open a wormhole from another dimension to Sugartown. This causes strange creatures, the Ora's, to invade the town. The Ora's are not evil. In fact, they use their arts to turn Sugartown into a vibrant place full of games.

Ownership of stuff is through tokens, which you can also wager in the games. As a reward for participating, you get "Sugar," an in-game currency. Matt Wolf, Vice President of Web3 at Zynga, said of the announcement, "We developed Sugartown to appeal to a the Web3 market. Over time, however, we want to scale it much more broadly and build a passionate and engaged community."

Zynga is one of the largest video game companies in the world, mainly in the field of mobile games. It is best known for "Farmville," a huge hit on Facebook. Take-Two ("Grand Theft Auto") bought Zynga last year for nearly $13 billion. Whether the NFT game is an indication of crypto integration into the planned new GTA game remains to be seen. Zynga also has a partnership with blockchain company Forte.