In the past two years, Azu, who has been mingling in the Web3 gaming circle, honestly says: Previously, when I heard 'completing tasks, grabbing airdrops', I would instinctively roll my eyes—forms, screenshots, speed competitions, and in the end, what I got was either worthless trash coins or delayed promises. But in 2025, watching YGG build YGG Play layer by layer, I finally felt that terms like tasks, Launchpad, and creator economy were genuinely starting to stand on the players' side. YGG positions itself as the 'go-to publisher for the hottest casual games in the crypto world', with a tagline 'Casual Games. Degen Outcomes.' that captures the essence perfectly: gameplay should be lightweight, the results can be fierce, and they are the kind that lets players share with the studios.
Let’s first discuss the most obvious move in the past few months: the launch of YGG Play Launchpad. It is not the kind of old-fashioned Launchpad that just gives you a subscription page and lets you rush with your wallet; instead, it integrates 'discovering new games, completing tasks, participating in launches, and playing with the community' into a complete pipeline. Through the information disclosed by the official, we can see that YGG Play bundles new games, task systems, token issuance, and player guidance into a unified entry point, allowing game developers to directly access a complete set of tasks, competitions, content amplification, and community feedback tools. For players, the core logic of the Launchpad has also changed: you are not entering based on who contributes more or clicks faster, but rather by completing tasks, participating in tests, and even staking $YGG to accumulate points and priorities, determining how much allocation you can receive based on your contributions and activity level. This 'play before allocation' order effectively reserves the earliest spots for those who have actually engaged with the game, rather than just those who manipulate K-lines.
Taking LOL Land as an example, as a game developed by YGG and launched on Launchpad, its token $LOL is designed as a purely utility token, circulating only on decentralized exchanges, mainly used to drive VIP progress, increase earning limits, and unlock additional gameplay. A significant portion of the issuance structure is reserved for future game incentives and Play-to-Airdrop, rather than for the team or short-term speculative purposes. For players like us, the biggest benefit is: if you are willing to keep playing and completing tasks, what you receive is not just a string of cold 'candies', but real permissions and long-term rights within the game, making the 'play-to-earn' aspect finally feel a bit like that of a professional player, rather than just opening blind boxes.
Going a layer deeper, you will find that YGG has also done a lot of fundamental work on the 'tasks → points → assets' link. Now, completing tasks in YGG Play is not just for a line of names on the leaderboard, but is clearly tied to two value pipelines: one is the points and allocation quotas of the Launchpad, and the other is exchanging points in partner games for $YGG tokens through the YGG Redeem platform. This has a particularly intuitive impact on old players like me—previously, each project had a completely different set of points, fragments, and strange 'cards' for completing tasks, and whether or not they could be redeemed relied entirely on the team's integrity; now YGG has forcefully created a unified承接 layer: points can correspond to the priority qualifications for the Launchpad and can also be redeemed for the ecosystem's universal $YGG, standardizing the 'results of tasks' from top to bottom. For players, this offers a higher certainty of time returns; for game developers, this provides a ready-made pipeline for attracting new players and retaining them.
Speaking of 'actual experiences', I will share a complete path of my own in YGG Play from Azu's perspective. The first time I entered YGG Play, I first looked at the Quests area—the entire page is a wall of task cards, each series corresponds to a specific game or a themed event, such as a trial line for newly launched games, special tasks during a certain conference, or limited-time challenges linked with ecological partners. The rules provided by the official state clearly: completing these tasks can earn points, and these points will directly affect your allocation weight in subsequent token issuances and unlock eligibility for additional rewards. After the experience, the biggest feeling is not that 'there's another task platform', but rather that finally, there is a 'task radar' that can help filter out garbage games—some poorly executed projects, due to poor data and player retention, will quickly be marginalized from the task flow; while those genuinely fun games will quickly surface on the task leaderboard and in the community. This 'discovery engine' made using player behavior as a sieve is more persuasive than any promotional video.
Another aspect that many people overlook is the increasingly robust collaboration and content network behind YGG Play. In mid-October, YGG Play announced a distribution partnership with Proof of Play Arcade behind Pirate Nation, effectively bringing a game team that already has a voice in both Web2 and Web3 communities into its 'Casual Degen' matrix. The same report also mentioned that YGG Play has successively partnered with Delabs Games, Pudgy Penguins, Gigaverse, etc., over the past few months. These are not just concept projects with PPT but IPs that have already been validated in the player community. From a player's perspective, this means you don't need to search for demos all over the world or join dozens of Discord servers; just keep an eye on YGG Play's updates, as it serves as a pre-filtered list of games and an event calendar. This 'entrance filtered by both the guild and the community' is an advantage in itself.
If we zoom out a bit, we can see that YGG has a whole set of 'rule updates' planned for 2025. The Guild Advancement Program (GAP), which has accompanied the community for ten seasons, officially concluded this August, with the official statement being very direct: not due to failure, but to make room for the next generation of automated task tools, reward pipelines, and on-chain achievement systems. Compared to the GAP era, now tasks are more integrated into the YGG Play front-end portal, with Launchpad, Redeem platforms, and various leaderboards catching them on the back end, reducing manual reviews and screenshot check-ins, which is the 'manual KYC'. The player participation path has become shorter and smoother. For those of us who are already accustomed to various task platforms, the actual feeling brought by this rule change is: you have a stronger predictability about 'what happens after completing a task', rather than praying that the team remembers you one day.
Content and offline activities are another piece of the puzzle that YGG Play has completed this year. In YGG's official narrative, YGG Play is not just a front-end operational position, but the 'information hub' of the entire YGG player economy. Most game updates, task entries, new game integrations, events, and player stories will be sent out from here. Coupled with this online center, the YGG Play Summit in Manila became a 'City of Play'—four different themed areas concentrated competitions, workshops, podcasts, booths, and task exchanges all within a few days in one city, where completing tasks on-site can also be directly exchanged for rewards on a dedicated page. For players, this is a closed loop of 'online tasks → offline experiences → online assets'; for creators, it provides a very clear growth path: through YGG's creator program, using videos, guides, graphics, live streams, and other formats to drive traffic to games, earning leaderboard points and fixed prize pool rewards.
Starting from Azu's own habits, if I were to give a friend who has just entered the circle and is willing to spend some time a guide on YGG Play, I would probably go like this: first, create a YGG account with an email or wallet, and conveniently connect a commonly used wallet; then directly enter Quests to see what activities match your time and devices—such as lightweight casual short games or limited-time tasks linked to a certain conference, treating them as a 'rewarding new game trial list'. If you find the gameplay smooth and feel the game has potential, you can continue to track its progress on the Launchpad and consider using a portion of $YGG or time to exchange for future tickets; if you already enjoy writing posts or editing videos, then consider yourself a 'part-time creator' in the ecosystem, following the rhythm of YGG's creator tasks to create content, striving to turn 'playing games' and 'writing guides' into a complete income combination.
For me, the true advantage of YGG Play lies not in giving players another opportunity to 'take advantage', but in its serious attempt to pull Web3 games back from being one-off speculative events to a sustainable player career: good games will be amplified by task data, failing projects will be calmly eliminated; good creators will be recognized and rewarded over the long term, rather than relying on a few viral short videos for a lifetime; players willing to invest time and effort can carve out their own path among games, tasks, offline activities, and governance tokens. As Azu, I care more about whether such a system can last through several cycles rather than the short-term fluctuations of a single token—and YGG's current 'player-driven super network' approach seems to be moving increasingly in this direction as we approach 2025.
In the end, it's still that old saying: anything related to tokens or earnings carries risks. This article is just an observation and experience sharing from an old player in the YGG Play system and does not constitute investment advice. If you also want to experience this new Web3 game entrance, you might as well start with a simple task, give yourself some time, and see how it differs from those 'gold farming factories' you've played in the past.
