When GameFi 1.0 collapsed in 2022, most guilds disappeared from the market. Tokens evaporated, the scholarship model broke, users left, and games closed down en masse. Many thought that YGG would also meet the same fate, just a relic of the Play-to-Earn era.
@Yield Guild Games #YGGPlay $YGG
But the reality is completely opposite. YGG not only survived but also maintained its leading position and even opened a new direction for the entire industry: transitioning from guild → player network → gaming identity layer.
From a technical perspective of an on-chain game economy, the reason YGG maintains its position starts from what made GameFi 1.0 die: dependency on the P2E model. Guilds depend on yields from scholarships. When yields collapse, guilds collapse.
YGG does not build infrastructure on yields. They build on players. And players do not 'disappear' just because a financial cycle ends.
The underlying reason YGG is sustainable lies in their creation of a network layer, not a fleet of assets.
In conversations with a few game teams preparing to launch, they said that YGG is the only organization that has real players, the ability to train players, and a system to measure behavior and retain the community. This is an asset that GameFi 1.0 cannot burn through, no matter how severe the market crash is.
A major misunderstanding in the industry is that 'YGG survives because it holds game assets.' This is fundamentally wrong. In 2023–2024, the most important part of YGG is not in NFTs or game tokens — but in player reputation, player identity, and data layer. These are things that do not depreciate with the market.
Skilled players, sustainable behavior, and contribution history are assets not shown on the chart. And YGG is the first entity to gather, standardize, and turn that data into the operational foundation of the entire community.
The real logic that allows YGG to maintain its position lies in three major shifts that they actively implemented after 2022.
First, they no longer see themselves as a guild but as the Player Layer of Web3. This sounds like narrative marketing, but from a technical standpoint, it means that YGG builds identification layers, scoring layers, and behavior layers for hundreds of thousands of players. When I tried to analyze some of the scoring systems that YGG implemented, it was clear they do not measure 'profit' but rather 'engagement durability,' 'contribution level,' 'in-game behavior,' and 'task completion ability.' This is the foundational data for games to select suitable players.
Secondly, YGG uses the community to solve the acquisition problem, one of the most expensive problems in traditional and Web3 games.
When a new studio builds a game, the biggest cost is not development, but user acquisition. YGG reduces this cost to almost zero for games by bringing real players in from the testing phase.
What I see in reality is that without YGG, many Web3 games in Southeast Asia would not have enough quality users to test the game loop.
This is not 'community support,' but an important infrastructure for any game that wants to survive.
Thirdly, YGG shifts from a 'yield extraction' model to a 'player reputation economy' model. Players are not rewarded for farming tokens, but for positive behavior. Reputation cannot be dumped. Reputation is not sold off when the market is down. Reputation is durable through each wave of activity.
When a player has a stable history, the game can use that data to allocate rewards, whitelists, items, or roles in the game society. This creates a new type of incentive — an incentive based on reputation, not based on tokens.
The impact of this structure on YGG's position is quite clear as the market enters a new cycle. Games in 2024–2025 no longer run on the Play-to-Earn model. They want retention, they want real players, they want behavioral data. And they cannot build a large community quickly enough to provide that.
YGG has become a natural bridge. They do not bring capital. They bring people.
A group of devs in the Philippines once told me that when they tried to run a playtest with 500 people through YGG, they collected data 8 times more than running Facebook ads. This is why games are increasingly tied to YGG.
From a market structure perspective, YGG maintains its position because it is not in a replaceable position. An asset guild can be copied. A reward model can be copied. A community cannot. Reputation cannot. Player identity cannot.
YGG is a network accumulated over many years, through millions of hours of real gameplay, through real social interactions. This is something that a new project cannot buy with raised funds.
But the most important point for YGG to maintain its advantage lies in their understanding of the true nature of gaming Web3: games need players, not yields. No one understands players like YGG does. Behavioral data, habits, spending levels, game life cycles — all of these YGG possesses, thanks to thousands of game tests and the actual activities of players.
As the market begins to shift towards user quality rather than wallet quantity, YGG naturally steps into the center of the Web3 gaming ecosystem.
YGG's opportunity in 2025–2026 lies in their potential to become the standard for the entire gaming identity industry.
Because every component in the ecosystem needs one thing: real users with real behavior. And YGG is the network that sustainably owns that layer in the industry.
