Brothers, do you still remember back in 2021? GameFi was heating up, and YGG, relying on the "scholarship" model, became the big boss in the eyes of all gold farmers. But at that time, there were quite a few dissenting voices in the community. Several newly emerging guilds had funding amounts that were more shocking than each other, and their slogans were deafening, with the core message being: YGG's model is outdated, we want to use a more "advanced" model to take it down!
The most popular "disruptive script" at that time was probably like this: Isn't YGG just an "NFT landlord"? We're different, we want to be the traffic entrance, create a game store, and become an asset bank! We want to use a cooler token model to seamlessly connect players, games, and assets, forming a closed loop, making YGG's single rental model seem clumsy and heavy.
So what happened? When the bear market of 2022 arrived, it was like a cold rain waking everyone up. Everyone suddenly realized that when the tide recedes, the most fatal issue is not that the model is not flashy enough, but that the games themselves are not being played. No matter how sophisticated your economic model design is, if the games you connect to are all short-lived projects for 'mining and selling', your platform becomes a rootless tree. Those claiming to connect everything found that there simply weren't that many 'things' to connect.
So, those (or that) former challengers did not simply 'cool down'. The more realistic script is: most of them silently tore up the script of 'eliminating YGG' and replaced it with a more pragmatic script called 'survival'.
They quietly did a few things:
1. No longer hardlining the 'guild' identity: YGG's community and asset network is built on years of accumulation, which cannot be matched in a head-on confrontation. So, I downplay the 'guild' label and instead emphasize that I am a 'game distribution platform', 'player growth platform', or 'gamified task platform'. I do not compete on who has more scholars; I compete on who can bring more effective users to game studios.
2. Shifting from 'asset holding' to 'service empowerment': No longer fixated on accumulating a large number of NFT assets for leasing (which is a huge burden in a bear market), but rather turning to provide marketing services, user incentive tools, and data analysis for games. Moving from a 'heavy asset' model to a 'light service' model significantly reduces cash flow pressure.
3. Token model 'pragmatization': The early complex dual-token and three-pool models have simplified significantly. The use of tokens is more related to the platform's own functional usage rights, transaction fee discounts, and ecological voting, rather than directly promising dividends from a specific game. This is because everyone understands that the sustainability of their own platform cannot be tied to the uncertainties of other games.
4. Finding differentiated ecological niches: Some found that they couldn't compete with YGG's comprehensiveness and turned to focus on a specific region or game type (such as FPS or card games), or chose to serve high-end paying players instead of the broader developer market that YGG excelled in during its early years.
So, if you look at those former challengers now, you will find an interesting phenomenon: their official websites and promotional materials rarely mention YGG directly anymore. It's not that they have forgotten, but rather that the battlefield has changed.
They no longer dream of becoming the 'next YGG', but rather want to be an indispensable 'partner X' for game studios. While YGG continues to deepen its community empire and self-developed games, these transformers have found their own new ways to survive as service providers, catalysts, and vertical experts in the gaps.
This may be a microcosm of the Web3 gaming industry moving from enthusiasm to rationality: the ones who take down the giants are often not another imitating giant, but rather a shift in the winds of the times. The smart people who survive have learned to stop being stubborn and instead adapt their scripts to the situation.
From this perspective, no one has lost. YGG has proven the value of deep accumulation, while the transformation of the challengers has demonstrated that in this ecosystem, flexibility and pragmatism are more valuable survival skills than slogans. The landscape is no longer about who replaces whom, but rather about each finding their own way to survive.
