This origin story is exploding right now because it perfectly captures web3 gaming's transformation from speculative experiment to genuine economic opportunity. Yield Guild Games didn't start in Silicon Valley boardrooms or through VC pitch decks. It began with a Filipino game developer lending NFTs to people who couldn't afford them during COVID lockdowns, creating income opportunities when traditional employment disappeared. Let's break down how YGG grew from hyperlocal Philippine roots into the world's largest gaming guild coordinating over 112,000 members globally.
Gabby Dizon: The Game Developer Who Started Everything
Understanding YGG requires understanding its co-founder Gabby Dizon, who brought 20 years of game development experience before ever touching crypto. In 2003, Gabby helped create the first Philippine-made game, pioneering the country's gaming industry when most peers chose conventional office jobs. He co-founded Altitude Games in 2014, building a mobile game studio creating titles for iOS and Android that became one of Southeast Asia's mobile gaming pioneers.
Gabby also served as founding member and former president of the Game Developers Association of the Philippines and coordinator of the IGDA Manila Chapter, championing game development across Southeast Asia. This deep industry background meant he understood game economics, player behavior, and community coordination long before blockchain entered the picture.
His crypto journey started in 2017 after hearing about Ethereum and how programmable smart contracts could transform gaming. CryptoKitties launched that December and broke the Ethereum network, capturing Gabby's imagination about non-fungible tokens and digital ownership. In October 2018, he discovered Axie Infinity and joined its community as a player, breeding Axies for fun while watching the game gain popularity.
The critical moment came when Gabby started lending his excess Axies to other players who couldn't afford the hundreds of dollars needed to start playing. This informal arrangement worked surprisingly well, with borrowers generating income they shared with Gabby while getting access to assets they otherwise couldn't obtain. That simple lending activity eventually inspired the scholarship model that would define YGG's initial success.
The COVID Catalyst: When Gaming Became Survival
Everything accelerated in 2020 when COVID lockdowns devastated the Philippine economy. Nearly 7.3 million Filipinos lost their jobs as the pandemic shut down traditional employment across the country. Government relief remained limited, leaving families desperate for any income source they could find. Into this crisis stepped an unexpected solution through blockchain gaming.
Axie Infinity players in rural Philippines discovered they could earn $300 to $400 monthly through gameplay, often exceeding local minimum wage. For families facing zero income after losing traditional jobs, this represented genuine lifeline rather than just supplementary earnings. A province called Nueva Ecija north of Manila became ground zero for this movement, with entire communities coordinating around play-to-earn gaming.
Gabby watched this unfold and recognized the profound implications. To crypto investors, gaining $300 or $400 monthly might seem insignificant, but for Filipino families it meant the difference between feeding their children or going hungry. The economic impact was real and immediate, not speculative future promises but tangible income arriving today.
The story gained wider attention when Coindesk columnist Leah Callon-Butler wrote an op-ed in August 2020 detailing how blockchain gaming was driving economic progress across Southeast Asia. Her article quoted Gabby explaining how Axie became a lifeline for Filipino families. The piece went viral, striking a nerve across Southeast Asia and spurring massive user adoption growth in the Philippines, Indonesia, Venezuela, and Brazil, all countries where unemployment surged dramatically during the pandemic.
October 2020: YGG is Born
By October 2020, the opportunity became undeniable. Gabby joined forces with fintech entrepreneur Beryl Li and anonymous developer Owl of Moistness to officially establish Yield Guild Games. They weren't just creating another gaming guild but building complete ecosystem where people could make genuine money from playing games while the traditional economy collapsed around them.
The mission focused on democratizing access to web3 gaming economies, particularly in emerging markets where traditional employment opportunities remained limited. The scholarship model they pioneered addressed the capital barrier preventing participation. YGG would raise funds from investors, purchase income-generating NFTs across multiple games, then lend those assets to scholars who would play and share earnings with the guild.
With lead investor Delphi Digital's support, the team raised an initial seed round of $1.325 million. This capital funded NFT purchases across Axie Infinity and other games, creating productive asset portfolio that could be deployed through the scholarship program. By November 2020, YGG was operational with initial scholars earning income through borrowed Axies.
The setup created wonderful opportunities where players became so successful they could live off their rewards, with many earning more than their former jobs. This wasn't theoretical blockchain innovation happening in developed markets. This was immediate economic impact transforming lives in rural provinces where families faced genuine hardship.
The Documentary That Changed Everything
In December 2020, YGG funded production of a short documentary film titled "Play-to-Earn: NFT Gaming in the Philippines" revealing the story of the Nueva Ecija community earning income through Axie Infinity after losing jobs during COVID. The film was inspired by Netflix's "Daughters of Destiny" documentary about disadvantaged Indian children receiving life-changing educational opportunities.
The YGG team partnered with Leah Callon-Butler and her Emfarsis Consulting team to bring her Coindesk article to life in video format. Filming began in January 2021 when NFTs remained relatively niche topic. The team deliberately avoided excessive technical jargon, ensuring content would be broadly accessible to audiences with no prior crypto exposure.
The documentary captured something powerful that statistics alone couldn't convey. It showed real families, real struggles, and real solutions emerging from an industry most people dismissed as speculative gambling. Players reported monthly earnings reaching $400, exceeding local minimum wage and providing genuine economic opportunity during crisis.
The film went on to win awards and generate massive attention for both YGG and the play-to-earn movement. It validated that blockchain gaming wasn't just about speculation or enriching early adopters but could create meaningful economic access for people facing genuine hardship. This message resonated globally, driving exponential user growth throughout 2021.
Explosive Growth: From Hundreds to Thousands
The combination of documentary exposure, economic necessity, and genuine earning opportunities created explosive growth throughout 2021. YGG expanded from initial hundreds of scholars to coordinating thousands by mid-year. By March 2022, the organization managed over 20,000 active scholars generating meaningful income through gameplay.
The July 2021 Initial DEX Offering on SushiSwap MISO platform raised additional capital while distributing YGG tokens to community members. The token launched with explicit governance rights, allowing holders to vote on the future of the guild through DAO structure. YGG raised over $5 million from top-tier VCs including Andreessen Horowitz, Delphi Digital, Gumi Cryptos, and BITKRAFT, validating the model's potential.
The scholarship program revenue splits typically gave scholars 60 to 70 percent of earnings, community managers 10 to 20 percent, and the guild treasury the remainder. This aligned incentives created situation where everyone benefited from strong performance. Scholars maximized effort because they kept majority of earnings. Community managers recruited and trained effectively because their income tied directly to scholar success. The guild treasury grew as the entire network performed well.
Geographic expansion happened rapidly. Initial Philippine focus broadened to Indonesia, India, Venezuela, Brazil, and beyond. Each market faced similar challenges of limited traditional employment and economic hardship where play-to-earn offered genuine alternative income. YGG relied on local community leaders who helped translate content and provide support in native languages, acknowledging that localization determined success.
The Regional SubDAO Innovation
As YGG expanded across multiple countries and games, managing everything through centralized structure became impractical. The innovation that solved this was regional subDAOs, specialized miniature economies operating semi-autonomously while contributing to the broader YGG ecosystem.
The first regional subDAO, YGG SEA focusing on Southeast Asia excluding the Philippines, launched in early 2022. Ola GG had pioneered the Latin American market earlier. These regional organizations provided localized leadership teams delivering language-specific support, culturally adapted educational content, and programs designed for specific market dynamics.
The federal structure eventually expanded to include IndiGG serving India, BAYZ focusing on Brazil, YGG Japan targeting Japanese markets, SKYGG coordinating Korea, AMG covering Central and Eastern Europe, and Troy operating in Turkey and Egypt. Each regional subDAO maintains its own leadership team, wallet, and often its own subDAO token representing ownership in that specific unit.
This distributed architecture allows parallel scaling where each region grows independently without creating bottlenecks at central coordination. The model acknowledges that gaming preferences, earning expectations, communication styles, and trust-building mechanisms vary dramatically across cultures. What works brilliantly in the Philippines might fail completely in Brazil or India without cultural adaptation.
Surviving the 2022 Collapse
The euphoric growth couldn't last forever. By 2022, the play-to-earn model that made YGG successful started collapsing as Axie Infinity's economy imploded. Token prices crashed, scholar earnings plummeted, and the fundamental sustainability of the entire model came into serious question. Axie's dramatic decline from peak to trough destroyed billions in value and left many players feeling exploited.
YGG faced existential crisis. The organization's competitive advantage had been the scale and reach of its scholarship program, but that advantage evaporated when play-to-earn games stopped generating meaningful income. If scholars couldn't earn, why would they participate? If scholars weren't participating, why invest in NFT assets generating no returns? The entire value proposition seemed to unravel simultaneously.
But YGG survived by rapidly evolving beyond pure scholarship coordination. The organization diversified into broader community building, connecting players to games and opportunities rather than just facilitating asset rental. Investment expanded into infrastructure that would remain valuable regardless of any single game's success, including reputation systems using Soulbound Tokens tracking player achievements across multiple games and platforms.
The Guild Protocol emerged during this adaptation period, providing blockchain-based framework with tools for guilds to manage treasuries, track member achievements, and establish verifiable on-chain identities. Instead of just lending NFTs, YGG positioned itself as infrastructure provider for the entire web3 gaming ecosystem. This strategic pivot preserved the organization's relevance even as the original business model became unsustainable.
The Publishing Pivot: YGG Play Launch
By 2025, YGG completed its transformation from scholarship coordinator to comprehensive gaming ecosystem. The launch of YGG Play as the organization's publishing and distribution arm in May 2025 marked strategic evolution toward creating rather than just facilitating access to games.
LOL Land became the first self-published title, launching with over 116,000 pre-registrations and generating over $5.6 million in revenue within months. This success validated the pivot toward publishing and demonstrated that YGG's community could monetize quality games effectively when designed properly for crypto-native audiences.
The publishing model provides full-stack support including go-to-market strategy, creator-led marketing, user acquisition, token launches, and smart contract-enforceable revenue sharing. YGG Play takes no token allocation from launched projects, profiting only through platform fees and services. This aligns incentives ensuring YGG Play succeeds only when the games it publishes succeed.
Third-party developers quickly joined including Proof of Play bringing Pirate Nation's elite team, Gigaverse contributing fully on-chain RPG experience, Delabs Games publishing GIGACHADBAT, and Pudgy Penguins adding mainstream IP recognition. Each partnership strengthened the ecosystem's network effects while demonstrating that quality developers view YGG Play as viable alternative to traditional publishing.
The YGG Play Summit 2025: Coming Full Circle
The YGG Play Summit held in Manila during November 2025 represented full-circle moment for the organization's Philippine roots. Over 5,600 attendees showed up in person while 490 million global online impressions demonstrated the movement's massive reach beyond its original local focus.
The event's City of Play theme celebrated content creators whose impact and influence move web3 gaming from niche to mainstream. The 2025 Creator of the Year award went to Cagyjan, co-founder of the Silly Kitties IP and one of the earliest content creators in web3 starting with Axie Infinity in 2020. His career began during the play-to-earn boom and he eventually made Manila his home after the ecosystem enabled his success, embodying YGG's mission of creating economic opportunities through gaming.
The summit concluded with Axie Open Manila, an esports tournament with $120,000 cash prize where players from the Philippines and other countries competed. This high-profile competitive gaming event demonstrated how far Philippine blockchain gaming had evolved from its humble origins during COVID lockdowns.
Education featured prominently throughout the summit, emphasizing the need for creators, students, and aspiring builders to stay current with rapid changes in web3 and AI. The Metaversity initiative providing free web3 and AI courses helps community members build sustainable career paths beyond just play-to-earn gaming, acknowledging that skills developed through YGG participation should transfer to broader digital economy opportunities.
From Local Solution to Global Infrastructure
Today's YGG bears little resemblance to the informal Axie lending program Gabby started in his spare time. The organization evolved into decentralized autonomous organization with over 112,000 Discord members, partnerships across 80-plus games and infrastructure projects, 105 Onchain Guilds operating through Guild Protocol, 11 regional subDAOs providing localized coordination, comprehensive publishing division launching and distributing games, and reputation systems tracking achievements across multiple titles.
But the Philippine roots remain visible throughout everything YGG does. The focus on emerging markets where play-to-earn creates genuine economic opportunity rather than just supplementary income reflects lessons learned watching Nueva Ecija families survive COVID through gaming. The emphasis on localization and community-led coordination mirrors the regional approach that made Philippines YGG's initial success. The commitment to fair revenue sharing and transparent partnerships echoes the original scholarship model's aligned incentives.
Gabby Dizon's vision of helping people escape poverty through equal economic access to crypto-based economies anywhere in the world hasn't changed since 2020. The methods evolved dramatically as the organization learned what works and what doesn't in web3 gaming. The scholarship model that defined early success gives way to publishing, infrastructure provision, and comprehensive ecosystem operations. But the core mission remains helping people earn income through gaming regardless of their geographic location or economic circumstances.
The transformation from local Philippine initiative to global DAO coordinating hundreds of thousands of members across dozens of countries validates that blockchain gaming can create genuine value when designed properly. YGG's survival through multiple market cycles while competitors failed demonstrates adaptive capacity that separates sustainable organizations from hype-driven projects.
The Journey Continues
Yield Guild Games' evolution from informal NFT lending in the Philippines to global gaming DAO spanning 11 regional territories illustrates both blockchain gaming's potential and its challenges. The original play-to-earn boom that created YGG also nearly destroyed it when unsustainable economics collapsed. The organization's survival required continuous adaptation, strategic pivots, and willingness to evolve beyond the model that initially brought success.
The Philippine roots matter because they grounded YGG in solving real problems for real people rather than chasing speculative opportunities. The families in Nueva Ecija didn't care about blockchain technology or token speculation. They needed income to survive and Axie provided that income when nothing else did. This genuine use case kept YGG focused on practical value creation even when broader markets chased hype.
Today's YGG coordinates gaming activities across dozens of countries, publishes multiple titles generating millions in revenue, and provides infrastructure enabling thousands of smaller guilds to operate effectively. The organization's reach extends far beyond the Philippines, but the lessons learned during those early COVID days inform every strategic decision.
YGG's journey from Philippines roots to global DAO demonstrates that web3 gaming can create genuine economic opportunity when built on sustainable foundations rather than speculative hype.
The transformation required constant evolution, but the core mission of democratizing access to digital economies remained constant throughout. That consistency explains why YGG survived when dozens of competitors failed, and why the organization remains positioned to lead web3 gaming's next evolution regardless of where it goes from here.
