In the craziest year of blockchain gaming (Play-to-Earn) in 2021, an organization from the Philippines quietly changed the fate of tens of thousands of people.

It is called Yield Guild Games, abbreviated as YGG - it is neither a game studio nor a traditional venture capital, but a large decentralized gaming guild completely owned, governed, and shared by players.

YGG addresses the most painful barrier in blockchain gaming: to play Axie Infinity, you need to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars to buy three Axie NFTs. For ordinary young people in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and India, this is almost an astronomical figure.

YGG's answer is simple and radical: we pool money to buy NFTs, then lend them to you for free to play, and we split the profits 50/50. This is the 'Scholarship' model that later swept the globe. At its peak in 2021, YGG managed over 40,000 'scholars,' most of whom were from the Philippines, Indonesia, Brazil, and Venezuela.

Many of these people are waiters, drivers, and students who lost their jobs due to the pandemic. They have started to support themselves and their families by playing games for the first time. Some are earning $1000 a month, which is already a middle-class income locally. YGG has thus been referred to by Time magazine as 'digital relief for developing countries.'

Where does the money come from? The answer is the community treasury. YGG has deployed transparent smart contract treasuries on Ethereum and Ronin chains, which contain tens of thousands of NFTs and tokens from dozens of games. These assets do not belong to any founder but to all holders of YGG tokens.

Want to use the treasury to buy land for new games, invest in new projects, or expand scholarship scales? Proposals must be initiated on Discord and Snapshot, and voted on by global token holders. Truly, 'code is law, and the community is the boss.' To accommodate different games and regions, YGG invented the SubDAO mechanism. For example: IndiGG specializes in the Indian market, providing training in Hindi;

BAYC (Brazil Axie Guild) organizes the Portuguese-speaking community;

Good Games Guild (GGG) focuses on high-end players in Europe and the United States.

These sub-guilds act like franchises, using assets from the main treasury while deciding their own profit-sharing ratios, training methods, and even organizing offline competitions based on local conditions. Decentralized yet effective. After 2023, the inflation crisis of Axie Infinity plunged the entire Play-to-Earn industry into a winter, and YGG's assets and token prices also significantly declined.

Interestingly, the community did not disperse; instead, it began to self-evolve. They shifted their focus from 'single game leasing' to 'diversified asset management': packaging Axie, Sandbox land, Illuvium characters, and Pixels farms in the treasury into vaults with different yield strategies;

Allow token holders to stake YGG and enjoy dividends from real game outputs, instead of relying on speculative token issuance;

Even attempting to create a blockchain game version of an 'index fund' for one-click investment in the entire Web3 gaming sector.

Meanwhile, YGG began to lay out a more fundamental track: an on-chain reputation system. In the future, your game achievements, scholarship repayment records, and guild contributions may all become immutable on-chain credit scores, used to borrow more NFTs, apply for larger scholarships, and even for real-world loans.

This is the real beginning of allowing players to 'own their data.' Today, looking at YGG, it is no longer just 'Axie Guild.' It owns: a portfolio of assets spanning over 30 mainstream blockchain games;

Over 50 SubDAOs spread across the globe;

An emerging on-chain identity and credit protocol;

And a hardcore community that has experienced bull and bear markets while maintaining active governance.

It proves one thing: in the Web3 era, players can completely organize themselves without relying on game companies, turning 'playing games' into a sustainable collective endeavor. YGG's treasury, SubDAOs, scholarships, and on-chain governance, all these mechanisms together form a digital economic infrastructure shared by players.

Regardless of when the next blockchain gaming bull market arrives, YGG is already prepared — not as a parasite on a popular game, but as an independent economic foundation built by players themselves, distinct from any single game. This may be the most romantic experiment of Web3: a group of ordinary players, using the most transparent code, collectively owns the economic lifeline of an entire virtual world.

@Yield Guild Games #YGGPlay $YGG