Crypto gaming mostly annoys me now

I’ve seen too many cycles where everything sounds revolutionary on Twitter and completely falls apart once real users show up. Play-to-earn promised income, delivered inflation. DAOs promised ownership, delivered Discord drama. NFTs promised permanence, delivered bags nobody wanted to hold two months later.

So yeah, when Yield Guild Games kept popping up, I wasn’t impressed. My first reaction was literally, another DAO, another gaming narrative. Nothing special.

But the weird thing is, YGG didn’t disappear. It didn’t fade like most of these projects do when the hype dries up. It just… kept operating. Quietly. That alone made me look twice.

Here’s my take, and I’m not trying to sell anything.

Gaming has always been about money. We just lie to ourselves about it.

Before NFTs, people were already buying accounts, farming gold, flipping rare skins, grinding for others. Anyone who played MMOs seriously knows this. The economy was always there, just unofficial. Studios took their cut, players took the risk, and everyone pretended it was fine.

Yield Guild Games doesn’t pretend.

YGG treats in-game assets like capital. Cold word, I know. But accurate. These NFTs aren’t trophies. They’re tools. They’re meant to be used, loaned, rotated, optimized. If that makes gaming feel less “pure” to you, fair enough. But purity left the chat a long time ago.

What I actually respect is that YGG doesn’t try to hide this behind feel-good language. No “everyone wins” nonsense. No fake egalitarian vibes. It’s more like: look, some people have money, some people have time, very few have both. Let’s coordinate instead of pretending that imbalance doesn’t exist.

That honesty is rare in crypto.

The DAO structure is messy, and anyone telling you otherwise is lying or new. SubDAOs exist because no single group can understand every game, every meta, every region. South Asia doesn’t play like Europe. One game rewards grind, another rewards timing. Centralizing that knowledge would be dumb.