Mythical Games revolutionizes gaming and digital asset ownership

Founded in 2018, Mythical Games is a pioneer in blockchain gaming, centered on empowering players with true ownership of their in-game assets. With Mythos Chain as its dedicated blockchain infrastructure, Mythical Games enables safe, seamless, and decentralized gaming economies. The Mythos Chain facilitates asset ownership, secondary markets, and user-generated content (UGC) monetization, creating vibrant, player-driven economies across all Mythical titles.

Challenge: Overcoming scaling demands

The inspiration behind Mythical Games and Mythos Chain arose from the prevalence of gray markets in traditional gaming. Popular games like World of Warcraft and Fortnite lacked formalized systems for trading in-game assets, leading players to resort to unofficial, often risky channels. With a clear demand for asset ownership and trading, Mythical Games via Mythos Chain sought to change this by building a platform where digital assets could be securely owned, traded, and utilized within regulated ecosystems.

"Every video game that doesn't have a well-developed secondary market tends to have a semi-legal secondary market," notes Cameron Thacker, VP of Blockchain Technology at Mythical Games. "Instead of fighting it, our thesis is to embrace it and make it safer for people so they don't get scammed."

Mythical Games initially attempted to solve these challenges using EOS and later a permissioned Ethereum sidechain. However, Ethereum’s high gas fees and insufficient transaction speeds made it impractical for gaming operations at scale. The team needed a blockchain platform that could support millions of daily transactions, high-performance gaming operations, and flexibility for future growth.

Solution: Building secure, scalable digital asset infrastructure

After evaluating numerous blockchain platforms, Mythical Games selected Polkadot for its combination of decentralization, flexibility, and reliability. Working with Parity and BlockDeep, the team seamlessly migrated their entire infrastructure, including 6M+ accounts, from EVM-based smart contracts to Polkadot-based code.

The migration delivered significant performance improvements. Polkadot's modular architecture enabled Mythical Games to maintain high-performance gaming operations while benefiting from the shared security of the Polkadot Chain. The platform's governance capabilities and roadmap, including upcoming Polkadot 2.0 upgrades, aligned perfectly with Mythical's vision for progressive decentralization.

"Polkadot is robust with a long track record of working really well," explains Thacker. "The roadmap with Polkadot 2.0 and Agile Coretime shows improvement after improvement."

Results and impact

The migration of Mythos Chain to Polkadot proved remarkably smooth. "Even some of our more skeptical team members were pleasantly surprised by how well everything worked," shares Thacker. The platform maintained continuous marketplace functionality throughout the transition, demonstrating its robust architecture.

The success continued after migration, most notably with the launch of NFL Rivals. The game processed over 3 million transactions in its first 48 hours without any technical issues. Through iterative updates and player-focused enhancements, the game has achieved consistently improving engagement and retention metrics. The Mythos Chain infrastructure has since facilitated over 16 million NFT transactions, validating the platform's scalability.

What’s next

Mythical Games has charted an ambitious expansion strategy for 2025, anchored by two major game launches: Pudgy Penguins’ Pudgy Party and FIFA Rivals, which are slated for Summer 2025. The company's success with NFL Rivals has created a blueprint for future sports-focused titles, with plans to extend the Rivals brand across new sports leagues and game genres, leveraging Polkadot's flexible infrastructure.

Third-party development forms another key pillar of growth, though with a distinctively selective approach. "We're going for massive games with the most impact per title versus a shotgun approach," explains Thacker. This philosophy stands in contrast to the broader blockchain gaming market, where quantity often overshadows quality. Mythical carefully curates its partnerships, focusing on developers who share their vision for high-quality, engaging gameplay.

Meanwhile, Mythical continues to test new features on Polkadot, particularly in user-generated content monetization and enhanced trading capabilities. These innovations will inform improvements across Mythical's entire ecosystem, ensuring each game maintains the company's high standards for both gameplay and economic design.

Through this measured expansion strategy, Mythical Games aims to demonstrate how blockchain gaming on Polkadot can achieve mainstream success without compromising on quality or player experience.