@Yield Guild Games #YGGPlay $YGG
Yield Guild Games didn’t begin with a whitepaper or a venture deck. It began with a simple observation in late 2020: thousands of young Filipinos were earning more playing Axie Infinity than they could in most entry-level jobs, yet almost none of them could afford the three creatures needed to start. Three friends Gabby Dizon, Beryl Li, and Owl of Moistness decided to change that. They pooled money, bought Axies, and lent them out on a 70/30 revenue split. The scholarship model was born in a Google Sheet. Within months that sheet turned into the largest decentralized workforce the gaming world had ever seen.
What makes this story different is that the guild never positioned itself as a company extracting value. From day one, the earnings were split with players, the NFT assets were moved into a community treasury, and every major decision started drifting toward on-chain votes. A guild became a collective, and the collective quietly became one of the most successful experiments in digital cooperativism.
The Economics of Shared Ownership
Most gaming guilds treat players as gig workers. YGG inverted the model: the players are the partial owners. When a scholar earns SLP in 2021, part of it buys more Axies, which are then owned by the treasury — which is governed by YGG token holders, a circle that increasingly includes the scholars themselves. The loop closes.
This structure created something rare in crypto: revenue that isn’t speculative. Rental income, breeding fees, land yields, tournament prizes these are cash flows that exist whether the token price is up or down. In 2022, when almost every GameFi token lost 95 %, YGG’s treasury kept paying scholarships because the underlying games were still printing money for players. The token crashed, but the guild grew. That resilience wasn’t luck; it was the direct result of aligning incentives so that the protocol makes money only when real humans do.
The SubDAO Archipelago
By 2023 the Philippines-centric model had reached its natural limits. Instead of scaling a central monolith, the team did something elegant: they let regions fork the playbook. Indonesia, Brazil, India, Vietnam, and a dozen more countries now run semi-autonomous SubDAOs with their own managers, treasuries, cultures, and P&L statements. Each SubDAO focuses on the three or four games that actually matter locally. The global treasury takes a small tax for shared infrastructure (analytics, legal, developer relations), but 90 % of the yield stays home.
The result feels like the internet in the 90s: different languages, different memes, same open protocol. A kid in Lagos and a student in São Paulo can both earn a living from the same treasury without ever speaking the same language, because the rules live on-chain and the revenue splits are automatic.
From Renting NFTs to Building Games
Renting assets was never the endgame; it was the bootstrap. In 2024 the guild started shipping its own titles. LOL Land a deliberately silly, hyper-casual game was designed to onboard the next hundred million players who will never read a whitepaper. More importantly, every mechanic inside the game feeds back into the guild: points earned become reputation, reputation unlocks higher-yield scholarships, scholarships generate revenue that buys more land in the next game. The flywheel is no longer dependent on third-party developers.
The City of Play
Once a year the digital nation becomes temporarily physical. The 2025 summit in Manila wasn’t marketed as a conference; it was built like a pop-up city with districts dedicated to skill-building, creator economy, competitive gaming, and policy discussions. Scholars who had never left their province walked the same halls as venture capitalists and game studio founders. The emotional high point was the scholarship graduation ceremony: hundreds of players, many supporting entire families for years, receiving their first on-chain credentials and profit-share tokens in front of the people who once lent them three cartoon axolotls.
Where It’s Going
The guild is quietly becoming infrastructure. Guild Protocol v2 (already in beta) lets any community spin up their own asset-backed economy in a weekend. The long-term vision isn’t to own every game, but to make it economically rational for every game to integrate with a global pool of players who already know how to earn, govern, and distribute value together.
In an industry obsessed with moonshots and 1000× returns, YGG took the slow, messy, human route: start with real earnings for real people, put them in partial control, and refuse to separate the token price from the lived experience of the community. The result is something that doesn’t feel like just another crypto project. It feels like the early internet again imperfect, argumentative, occasionally chaotic, and undeniably alive.
The guild never promised to make anyone rich quick. It promised something harder: a seat at the table for anyone willing to play, learn, and build. Four years in, that promise is still being kept, one scholar, one SubDAO, one small on-chain vote at a time.
