If you’ve been in crypto long enough, you learn to be suspicious of anything that sounds like a new “sector.” But you also learn to respect the few ideas that keep reappearing because they solve a real human problem. Yield Guild Games sits in that second category. At its heart, YGG is not really about tokens or NFTs in the abstract. It’s about access—who gets to participate in new digital economies, and who gets left behind when the cost of entry becomes a wall. In the early days of play-to-earn, that wall was painfully literal: you couldn’t play competitively without owning expensive in-game NFTs. YGG’s earliest instinct was almost plain and practical: pool capital, buy the assets, and let players who didn’t have money still have a way in. Over time, that simple idea grew into something more complicated—a DAO that tries to coordinate players, communities, and game assets across multiple worlds, without losing its original soul.
Most credible accounts place YGG’s founding in late 2020, right in the middle of a strange global moment where people were stuck at home and searching for new income wherever they could find it. It’s hard to overstate how emotionally charged the Axie Infinity wave felt in places like the Philippines: for some players, it wasn’t a hobby, it was a lifeline. YGG’s own writing from that era talks about players reporting meaningful earnings during lockdown, and it’s not difficult to see why the scholarship model—lending NFTs to “scholars” who would play and share revenue—spread so quickly. YGG’s founders are often named as Gabby Dizon, Beryl Li, and “Owl of Moistness,” and the early structure described by outside reporting is very specific: scholars playing with guild assets, managers onboarding and supporting them, and the guild taking a share to sustain the system.
The first real breakthrough moment came when this stopped being a clever workaround and started looking like a new kind of organization. In 2021, play-to-earn activity exploded, and reporting at the time cited massive growth in game wallets and daily users, with Axie becoming the flagship example of what Web3 gaming could look like at scale. In that environment, YGG became one of the most visible “guild” brands—part investment vehicle, part community, part talent pipeline. There was also a more subtle breakthrough happening in parallel: YGG began to formalize its architecture on paper. Its 2021 whitepaper laid out the idea of SubDAOs—separate, tokenized units organized around a specific game’s assets and activity—held under treasury control with multisig security and governed with community participation. The important idea wasn’t the jargon. It was the claim that a guild could behave like an index of many game economies, rather than living and dying with a single title.
Then the market shifted, and it wasn’t gentle about it. The scholarship model had a hidden fragility: it was tied to the health of individual game economies, and those economies were tied to speculation, token emissions, and user growth that couldn’t rise forever. When the broader GameFi hype cooled and some in-game tokens collapsed, the difference between “earning” and “extracting” became painfully visible. Reporting on YGG’s bear-market period described revenue declines alongside Axie’s economy weakening, with a sharp drop in guild revenue during late 2021 into 2022 as conditions changed. This is the phase where many projects either disappear or harden into something real. For YGG, it forced an uncomfortable kind of self-examination: if your mission is access, what happens when the game that created access stops being sustainable?
The survival phase is where YGG’s story becomes more mature—and also more honest. A guild that only optimizes for scholarships is basically a business model glued to a single market regime. The more interesting version of YGG is the one that treats scholarships as one chapter, not the whole book. Over time, YGG’s product language started to move toward “guild protocol” thinking: not only managing assets, but building systems that help communities coordinate across games—identity, onboarding, reward programs, and ways for guild members to participate without the relationship feeling like a simple manager-worker split. Even the way YGG talked about “vaults” evolved. Earlier writing introduced vaults as a DeFi-style extension of guild mechanics, and later the “Reward Vaults” program emphasized longer-term alignment and partner-linked rewards rather than a single loop that depended on one game staying hot.
This is also where upgrades and partnerships start to matter in a different way. In bull markets, partnerships can be decoration. In survival markets, partnerships have to do real work: bring players into sustainable games, support community engagement, and reduce friction without turning everything into extractive incentives. A clear example is YGG’s strategic partnership with Immutable announced in late 2024, including a stated $1 million commitment toward questing rewards and a focus on expanding game offerings and engagement. Whether you love or hate questing systems, this kind of collaboration signals that YGG has been leaning into a broader role: not merely renting NFTs, but acting as a distribution and community layer that game ecosystems want to plug into.
At the same time, the community itself matured. Early YGG felt like a wave—people arriving because they needed income or because they wanted exposure to a new kind of asset class. Over time, communities like this either fracture or deepen. YGG’s own framing of roles—scholars, managers, asset owners, the wider contributor layer—reveals the reality: it was always more than “players.” It was a social system. And social systems grow up. They develop norms, internal education, reputation, and a kind of collective memory about what worked and what didn’t. You can see that evolution in how YGG positions its events and gatherings too. The YGG Play Summit, for example, presents itself as a large-scale community and ecosystem convening, with public-facing claims of thousands of attendees and hundreds of partners—less like a token meetup, more like an attempt to keep Web3 gaming culture alive during quieter cycles.
None of this means the hard problems are gone. In some ways, they’re sharper now. Web3 gaming is still searching for its stable form. Many games struggle with retention once incentives fade. Tokenized economies invite speculation faster than they invite real play, and the line between “community rewards” and “unsustainable emissions” can blur quickly. Guilds face their own reputational challenge too: the scholarship model was empowering for some people, but it also made outsiders uncomfortable because it resembled labor markets more than play. And even when a guild tries to act like a neutral protocol, it still has to navigate the messy politics of games—changing rules, sudden nerfs, publisher decisions, and shifting player tastes. These are not problems you solve once with smart contracts. They’re problems you keep managing, slowly, with humility.
So why does YGG remain relevant today, even after the first wave of play-to-earn lost its innocence? Because the underlying need hasn’t disappeared. New digital economies will keep forming inside games and virtual worlds, and wherever value forms, the same question returns: who gets access, and who gets organized? YGG’s most durable contribution may end up being this idea that coordination itself is infrastructure—SubDAOs for specialization, vaults for aligned participation, and a community layer that helps players discover games, form groups, and stay engaged beyond one hype cycle. The project’s earlier chapter taught it what happens when you rely on a single economy. Its later chapter looks like an attempt to become something less fragile: a guild network that can survive changing games, changing markets, and changing tastes without betraying the people who joined because they wanted a fairer way in.
@Yield Guild Games #YGGPlay $YGG
