Brothers, Azu is here, an old player who has been educated by GameFi all the way from the gold farming era to now. In the past, when people heard about YGG, they thought of scholarships, guild wars, and where to 'move bricks'; but in the past two months, I've been focusing on the updates of YGG Play, and suddenly felt a strong sense of dislocation — this guild, which once rose to fame through gold farming, is now seriously creating a path for 'playing games as a legitimate career': at the front end is the already launched YGG Play Launchpad and LOL Land's $LOL debut, in the middle is the Points Quest encapsulated by the points and task system, and at the back end is the Creator Program and the recently expanded YGG Play Summit 2025, tying players, creators, and the 'future of digital work' together.
Let me first talk about my daily routine during this period. If you open yggplay.fun now, what you see is no longer a single game page, but a whole hub built around the Launchpad: the $LOL of LOL Land is prominently displayed as the first project, followed by a long list of task entries and a Points progress bar. The Launchpad officially launched on October 15, with the contribution window concentrated from October 29 to 31, and transactions only taking place on decentralized exchanges, without that kind of "centralized one-click quota grabbing" entry; what players need to do is first complete tasks in supported games, explore content, or stake some $YGG, gradually piling up YGG Play Points, and then use these points to exchange for the qualification to participate in the issuance.
This Points Quest system is, in my eyes, the "soul patch" of this upgrade round. The logic of a conventional IDO is that you first put money in line and then see if the system gives you a signature; YGG Play directly turns this around this time: first, it checks whether you have played, whether you have seriously participated in the ecology, and then decides how big a ticket to give you. Official and community analyses emphasize one point—there are two paths to earn YGG Play Points: the first is through on-chain and in-game tasks, from logging in, completing specific gameplay, to exploring content and participating in activities, with each corresponding to points; the second is staking $YGG, which means expressing long-term trust with funds, and then adding task behavior, ultimately forming your comprehensive weight on the Launchpad. For me, an old player who has been hurt by countless "lottery-style airdrops," this design of "behavior preceding funds" at least makes the process feel more causal.
Next is the positioning and distribution method of $LOL itself. LOL Land clearly states that $LOL is a "utility and loyalty token," rather than an investment target, with rewards coming entirely from in-game behavior and community participation; during the launch, the allocation to the Launchpad only accounted for 10% of the total token supply, with another 10% going to developers, 10% specifically allocated for Play-to-Airdrop, with two seasons of airdrops each taking half, and another 10% deposited into the LOL Pool for liquidity and gameplay expansion, while the remaining 60% is used for long-term game emissions, with the YGG Play issuing platform taking not a penny. For players, the benefit of this structure is that you see a very clear account: the bulk of the tokens goes to gameplay, to players, and to the subsequent game cycle, rather than first satisfying the "management fees" of the platform or early foundations.
If the issue that tokens and points solve is how to enter the game more fairly, then the Creator Program addresses whether there is room for growth after entering. YGG officially announced the structure of the YGG Play Creator Program at the end of October: each month, six themed Bounties will be fixed, with each prize pool worth 1200 USD in $YGG, open to all eligible users; at the same time, two monthly Leaderboards are running, each lasting two weeks and covering three Bounties, with a total prize pool of 10,000 USD, settled only for creators invited into the Program; the entire plan initially only accepts one hundred active members, with a maximum future expansion to two hundred. A key point is that every action you take on the platform will earn you points: playing games, submitting assignments, and posting content essentially helps you accumulate your on-chain resume.
Recently, I have been particularly attentive to several long articles analyzing the Creator Program on Binance Square, and there is a passage I quite agree with: this mechanism appears to be giving money, but in essence, it is conducting a "public audition." Bounty is your trial; Leaderboard is your evaluation form; the real prize is not just those thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in bonuses, but the opportunity to be "noticed by the official"—as long as you stay on the leaderboard for a long time, the YGG Play team will eventually bring you into that smaller circle of the Creator Program, providing you with more frequent collaborations, deeper resource support, and even opportunities for "official partner" at future Summits. In the words of that article, this may be one of the few paths you can see today that transitions from hobby to profession in Web3 gaming.
All of this has now converged at the YGG Play Summit 2025 in Manila. The Summit is currently taking place at SM Aura, and the official description says it is "the world's largest Web3 gaming event": continuing last year's standards, with over seven thousand attendees, more than three hundred cooperative communities and guilds, over sixty on-site games and sponsors, more than one hundred fifty speakers, and a total prize pool exceeding 130,000 USD. This year's sponsorship lineup has also included projects like Sky Mavis, Pixels, Parallel TCG, and Sui. The key point is that the organizers have directly positioned the event as the "City of Play," half a gaming carnival, and half an experimental field around the digital workforce of the Philippines, with Skill District specifically expanded to accommodate training related to Web3 and AI, combined with the Creator Zone and Arena, allowing "playing games, creating content, and learning skills" to truly happen in the same space.
The funding structure in the background is also quietly underpinning all of this. The latest update from CoinMarketCap mentioned that at the end of October, YGG allocated 50 million $YGG from the treasury, approximately 5 million USD, into a new Ecosystem Pool specifically to enhance the liquidity and interoperability of YGG Play and other cooperative games; looking back a few months, they already conducted a repurchase of over 500,000 USD using income from LOL Land, directly returning the real cash flow generated by the game to the tokens. What does this mean? It means that a portion of the revenue you generate in YGG Play ecosystem games like LOL Land, Gigaverse, and Pirate Nation will ultimately become repurchases, liquidity support, and future activity budgets, rather than just stopping at the "project revenue" line.
From the perspective of AZU, I now see YGG Play as a progressive "career line." The outer layer consists of games and tasks that anyone can participate in: as long as you are willing to spend some time every day running around in LOL Land or other Casual Degen games, points will naturally grow in the background; stepping further in, you organize these experiences into content, monetizing your expression ability through Bounty and Leaderboard, turning "writing guides, making videos, and creating long articles" into a rhythm and assessment-based part-time job; going even deeper, through the Creator Program, Summit, networking, and skills, gradually moving towards the direction of "working full-time in Web3 game-related jobs"—whether it's community operations, content teams, product consulting, or even making games yourself, this path at least starts to take shape.
If you are just starting to pay attention to YGG Play, I would suggest you not rush to ask whether it is worth investing; first, understand whether it is worth spending time. Spend a week seriously experiencing LOL Land and the Launchpad, and clarify the rules of Points Quest; then try to answer the question, "What benefits does this mechanism bring to ordinary players" with one or two pieces of content, and casually throw it into Bounty to see the feedback; if one day you find yourself accustomed to writing your daily progress into a log and editing it into short videos, that might be the moment you start to transform from a "player" into a "badge holder." At least on this line of YGG Play, I have seen a possibility different from traditional work: you are not contributing online hours to a platform for free, but using verifiable game behavior and content output to gradually accumulate a truly personal on-chain resume.
