@Yield Guild Games In every crypto cycle there is a moment when the music cuts and you can suddenly see who had a business and who only had a token. Yield Guild Games hit that wall when play-to-earn collapsed. Guilds that depended on emissions and hype watched their income evaporate along with game tokens. YGG could have faded with them. Instead, it spent the bear market turning itself from a pure guild into something that looks more like a game publisher.
The starting point was fragile. YGG’s original model was straightforward: buy in-game NFTs, lend them to “scholars,” and take a share of the rewards those players generated. It worked during the Axie Infinity boom, but the engine was external. If rewards were high, everyone ate; if rewards died, so did the business. The guild’s destiny sat in the hands of game teams and inflationary reward pools. When those pools dried up, the weakness was impossible to ignore.
The bear market forced a reset. Rather than chasing the next yield meta, YGG leaned into products and infrastructure it could control. The quest system and the Guild Advancement Program, which reward players with soul-bound achievements for completing missions in partner games, were early signs of that pivot. They kept the community active when prices were down only, and they gave studios a way to rally players without promising unsustainable APR. It was still a supporting role, but it was closer to a platform than a farm.
First-party publishing is the bolder step. With YGG Play and its debut title LOL Land, a chaotic “casual degen” board game on Abstract, YGG stopped being just a routing layer and became the one shipping the game itself. That changes the revenue equation. Instead of relying mainly on external reward tokens, the guild can earn from passes, cosmetic items, collaborations, tournaments, and sponsorships inside its own titles. In other words, it is building businesses, not just positions.
That matters in a bear market because it reshapes risk. Previously, YGG’s cash flow mostly depended on how generous someone else’s game economy decided to be. Now, each first-party title is its own small profit-and-loss statement. If a game finds product-market fit, it can be updated with seasonal content, IP crossovers, and live events without needing a new bull run to justify its existence. A solid casual game that people open every day is a more reliable asset than the promise of the next 1000% yield farm.
The onchain revenue-sharing model emerging around YGG Play adds another layer. By wiring payouts between developers, publishers, and communities into smart contracts, the revenue splits become visible instead of hidden in a PDF somewhere. That level of transparency fits the original guild idea: align players, capital, and builders so that everyone can see how value moves. In a space that has burned people with opaque treasuries and vague revenue claims, verifiable flows become part of the product.
This is also arriving at a moment when the rest of GameFi has run out of easy narratives. The scholarship boom has cooled. Most new projects know they cannot lead with “come farm tokens and maybe the game will be fun later.” At the same time, there is still appetite for small, social, mobile-friendly games that feel native to crypto culture—memes, degen jokes, and all. YGG sits in that gap: it has a large community, experience vetting hundreds of titles, and now a pipeline that runs from discovery and quests to publishing.
None of this is guaranteed to work. Publishing is hard even for traditional studios, and first-party titles raise the stakes. A couple of hits can create revenue; a couple of misses can turn into a drag on the treasury. There is execution risk in trying to do too much at once: operate a global guild, run events, support partner games, and build your own catalog. If the games are forgettable, no smart contract or clever token design will fix that.
But if you zoom out, the direction feels healthier than the old play-to-earn grind. A guild that lives off emissions will always be at the mercy of the market cycle. A guild that owns games, distribution, and data has chance to be counter-cyclical, using the quiet parts of the market to build replayable experiences that are ready when attention returns. In that world, bear market strategy stops meaning “slash costs and wait” and starts meaning “ship and learn with a community that is still here when the noise dies down.”
YGG’s bear market playbook, centered on first-party publishing, is not about abandoning web3 ideals; it is about grounding them. Own some of the products. Make the revenue paths clear. Treat players as an audience with taste, not just liquidity with wallets. It is slower and less dramatic than the yield era, and that is the point. If web3 gaming is going to grow up, someone has to run the businesses that make fun sustainable. Right now, YGG is acting like it wants to be one of them.
