When I look back at the rise and fall of the play-to-earn cycle, it’s easy to see why so many projects disappeared as quickly as they emerged. Their foundations were built almost entirely on token emissions, hype loops, and extractive user behavior. What still stands out to me is how YGG managed not only to survive that collapse, but to exit it stronger, clearer, and more aligned with its core mission. And the more I’ve studied its trajectory, the more convinced I’ve become that YGG was never a P2E guild. It was a digital labor network disguised as one.
A big part of YGG’s longevity comes from the fact that it never anchored itself to short-term yield. While many guilds focused on maximizing asset rentals or farming rewards, YGG focused on people—onboarding, training, coaching, coordination, and community building. Those investments do not lose relevance when market incentives disappear; if anything, they become even more important. I’ve noticed that communities built around financial upside tend to vanish the moment returns dry up, but communities built around identity, culture, and shared growth tend to accelerate when the noise clears. YGG fits into the latter group.
Another reason YGG stayed relevant is that it recognized early that P2E was a transitional phase, not a destination. The network understood that if Web3 gaming was going to mature, the value would eventually shift toward player skill, reputation, and meaningful contribution. So while other guilds were scaling spreadsheets, YGG was scaling human capital—building SubDAOs, training networks, achievement systems, and decentralized reputation frameworks. That forward-looking posture gave YGG a kind of resilience that hype-driven models could never replicate.
I’ve always found it interesting that the narrative around YGG was shaped heavily by the external environment. During the P2E boom, YGG was treated as the flagship of an industry that many assumed would run on infinite yields. But when yields evaporated, the weakness wasn’t in YGG—it was in the games themselves. And once you separate the two, it becomes obvious why YGG continued to thrive. Its work was never solely about earning tokens; it was about building the infrastructure for people to enter digital economies with skills they could grow, refine, and monetize over time.
As I dug deeper, one pattern became impossible to ignore: YGG’s relevance survived because it was structurally divorced from the mechanics that caused the collapse. P2E died because it relied on flawed token economics, one-way value flows, and a constant need for new entrants. YGG’s model, by contrast, relies on durable elements—community cohesion, talent development, reputable identity, and cross-ecosystem mobility. These are not market-dependent. They don’t inflate and deflate with token prices. They compound.
Another factor that kept YGG in a position of strength is its regional architecture. SubDAOs like YGG Philippines, Vietnam, Brazil, and others were never built as yield factories. They were built as cultural and educational centers that trained thousands of people to navigate emerging digital economies. Even when the incentives dried up, these communities remained active because what they built together—a sense of belonging, shared progress, and collective identity—could not be unwound by a bear market. I’ve seen firsthand how resilient communities behave under stress, and YGG’s network fits that profile perfectly.
The industry has also shifted in a direction that validates YGG’s early intuition. Today, the focus of Web3 gaming is no longer on easy earnings—it’s on interoperability, talent, competitive depth, and reputation. YGG anticipated this evolution years before the market caught up. The systems it built—on-chain achievements, training tracks, player credentials, decentralized coordination—now sit at the center of what modern game ecosystems actually need. In other words, YGG’s long-term vision aged better than the market narrative that surrounded it.
What stands out most to me is how naturally YGG transitioned from being seen as a P2E guild to being recognized as an infrastructure layer for digital labor. That transition wasn’t forced. It was the logical endpoint of everything YGG had already been doing. And as more players, studios, and platforms look for ways to measure skill, reputation, and contribution on-chain, YGG’s ecosystem becomes increasingly valuable. The world wants systems that help people grow and that help economies identify real talent—and YGG has been building those systems quietly for years.
Ultimately, the reason YGG remains relevant long after the play-to-earn collapse is simple: YGG was never dependent on P2E in the first place. It used the P2E era as an onboarding moment, not a business model. Its real architecture—education, identity, coordination, and community capital—was always aimed at the next phase of Web3, not the noise of the moment. And now that the industry is shifting toward more sustainable models, YGG looks less like a survivor and more like an early architect of what comes next.
The more I reflect on it, the clearer the lesson becomes. Markets change. Narratives fade. Incentives rise and fall. But networks built on people—on their skills, their stories, their progress, their shared purpose—tend to outlast everything else. YGG understood that before almost anyone. And that’s why it’s still here, and why its relevance is not fading—it’s compounding.
