Sugartown, the Zynga-born web3 game, is winding down
D20 Labs, the studio that bought Sugartown from Zynga in 2024, said on July 8 it is shutting down all services and will hand the game's IP to the community. Some holders questioned the move; the team addressed where the money went.
Sugartown, the consumer web3 game on Abstract, is winding down. On July 8, the team announced through @visitsugartown that it had "decided to start the shut down all services for Sugartown."
The game began as Zynga's first web3 title before the company left the space. In 2024, Zynga sold Sugartown and all of its products and assets to D20 Labs, a studio led by former Zynga web3 executives Matt Wolf and Tommy Ngo, who respectively served as the division's VP and general manager. D20 Labs relaunched Sugartown on Abstract and ran it under a "rewarded play" banner.
In its statement, D20 Labs said it had fully developed several additional games but lost access to "a technical dependency through one of our partners" in "the fall of Q4," and, despite the games being ready to launch, could not find "a new landing spot" for them. It tied the decision to a continued decline in demand for crypto and blockchain gaming.
The team said it intends to release the full Sugartown IP — including unreleased and unannounced games — to the community "free and permanent," move the Oras collection to cc0, and that all NFTs "will remain onchain in your wallets and nothing with ownership will change." It said it was finalizing details "with counsel" and would post a follow-up "within the upcoming weeks."
The announcement drew a mixed reaction. In the replies, some holders posted messages of support while others questioned how funds raised during the project's Cores mint had been used. Those are unverified community comments, and Descout is not endorsing them.
D20 Labs addressed the question of money in the same statement. It wrote that the cofounders "took $1 annual salaries and never paid bonuses or any distributions," and that "all funds from Cores mint to founder contributions went into building the Sugartown ecosystem." Descout could not independently verify how the project's funds were spent.
Before the announcement, Descout had tracked Sugartown as dormant, with little recent original activity from the account. The wind-down closes one of the more visible studio-backed attempts to bring a mainstream audience into web3 gaming.