At one point, adding more games felt like the obvious move for Yield Guild Games.
More games meant more NFTs to deploy, more players to onboard, and more chances to generate revenue. Early play-to-earn environments rewarded expansion, so it made sense to keep going.
The problem was that the games didn’t behave the same way.
Some required constant oversight. Others barely needed attention. Player behavior shifted from title to title. Even simple things like asset utilization or onboarding couldn’t be copied cleanly. What worked in one game became a liability in another.
Trying to manage all of this from one structure slowed everything down.
Decisions piled up. Local issues waited for global approval. Strategies were discussed broadly but applied poorly. Over time, the bottleneck wasn’t the treasury or demand. It was the organization itself.
YGG didn’t respond by pulling back from games. It changed how responsibility was handled.
SubDAOs allowed smaller groups to focus on specific environments. Teams closer to the game could make decisions without looping the entire DAO into every adjustment. This didn’t eliminate coordination, but it reduced unnecessary friction.
The main DAO stayed responsible for treasury and long-term direction. Execution moved closer to where information actually lived.
This also changed how the YGG token was used in practice. Governance became less about constant votes and more about boundaries. Vaults tied staking to defined activity rather than passive participation.
Over time, YGG stopped trying to operate everything the same way. It started accepting that scale creates differences that can’t be flattened.
The takeaway isn’t about gaming. It’s about structure.
Organizations don’t usually fail because they grow too fast. They fail because they try to grow without changing how decisions are made.
YGG ran into that limit early. Adjusting to it is probably why it’s still around.
