Look, if you want to know who really lit the fuse on the whole play-to-earn craziness back in 2021, you’ve got to start with Yield Guild Games. Yeah, Axie Infinity gets all the headlines, but YGG is the one that turned a cute little Pokémon knock-off into actual jobs for tens of thousands of people who desperately needed the money.
Picture this:
it’s 2020, the pandemic is crushing the planet, and in the Philippines people are stuck at home with no work. Gabby Dizon, this guy who already had a pretty successful mobile gaming studio (sold it to Unity a couple years earlier), sees his friends going nuts over Axie Infinity. The game is genuinely fun, but here’s the catch: to even start playing and making money, you needed three Axies, which at the time cost like $600–$1,000. For most Filipinos? Forget it. That’s two or three months’ salary.
So Gabby has this light-bulb moment: what if we buy the Axies ourselves, lend them out to players for free, and just take a small cut of whatever they earn? That’s it. That simple idea became the scholarship program, and Yield Guild Games was born.
They launched quietly in July 2020. By September they already had their first batch of “scholars” grinding away. Word spread like wildfire in Discord servers and Facebook groups. Suddenly moms in the provinces, college kids who dropped out, even grandmas were breeding digital pets and cashing out real money through SLP tokens. At the peak, some of these scholars were pulling in $800–$1,000 a month, way more than the minimum wage. It was insane.
While everyone else was just playing the game, YGG was building an actual business around it. They raised a couple million from big-name VCs like Delphi and Bitkraft, turned themselves into a DAO so the community could vote on stuff, and started buying assets in every new hot game that popped up: The Sandbox, Illuvium, whatever. They even started swallowing smaller guilds in places like Venezuela and Brazil. By the end of 2021 they had over 20,000 scholars and were easily the biggest player in the whole space.
Of course the 2022 bear market kicked everyone in the teeth. SLP crashed from like 40 cents to basically nothing, scholars started quitting in droves, people were yelling that the whole thing was a giant Ponzi. Fair criticism, honestly. But YGG didn’t die like most of the other guilds. They pivoted hard: diversified into new games, built tools so smaller guilds could run under their umbrella (they call them SubDAOs), and focused on titles where you actually need skill instead of just mindless grinding.
And here’s the part that still blows my mind: even after everything crashed, YGG was still pulling in $20 million a year in revenue from royalties and fees. Not bad for a bunch of gamers who started lending out cartoon monsters.
People love to hate on P2E now and say it was all hype, but go talk to the families in Cebu or Quezon City who paid for their kids’ school with Axie money in 2021. That actually happened. YGG didn’t invent the idea, but they’re the ones who scaled it, made it real for regular people, and somehow survived the nuclear winter that killed 99% of the other projects.
So yeah, call it whatever you want: exploitative, unsustainable, genius, whatever. But don’t tell me play-to-earn would’ve been anywhere near as big without Yield Guild Games. They were the match that lit the whole thing on fire.
