The Web3 gaming niche is one of the primary sectors onboarding mainstream users to the cryptocurrency industry. For many gamers, the opportunity to make money doing what they love and contribute to the emergence of exciting new technology has been a primary motive.
Yield Guild Games (YGG) stands at the forefront of this movement through its community-driven products and initiatives that make Web3 gaming truly worthwhile. In this interview, we catch up with YGG founder Gabby Dizon to discuss the guild’s unique approach to Web3 gaming, the highly reckoned Filipino crypto-gaming community, the project’s growth trajectory, and future plans.
Interview with Yield Guild Games Gabby Dizon
1. In the clustered Web3 gaming sector, what sets Yield Guild Games apart?
In Web3, Yield Guild Games (YGG) is really known for the strength of its community. Today, we have a global online reach of over 3 million users across our regional guild partners, as well as partnerships with over 100 blockchain games and infrastructure projects that go toward developing the Web3 ecosystem.
YGG’s mission is to create opportunities so that our community can use their Web3 skills to become successful in life. We do this through our questing initiatives, Superquests, and the Guild Advancement Program (GAP). When players go on our quests, they complete tasks inside our partner games and contribute their skills to our community.
If they are successful, they receive soulbound tokens (SBTs) as a reward that they can collect to build their on-chain reputation. Later on, this helps us match their skills and achievements with other games and opportunities where they would be a good fit.
We also take the time to engage with our community on a deeper level. Whether it’s through our in-person events such as the YGG Web3 Games Summit (W3GS), grassroots community initiatives through our regional guild partners such as YGG Pilipinas’ annual Roadtrip and Web3 Metaversity program, or virtual parties we throw in our partnered games such as Pixels, we make it a priority to give back to our community members as much value for their time as possible.
2. Tell us about the Filipino gaming community and why you think they’ve been leading global blockchain gaming adoption
Gaming in the Philippines has always been very socially driven. In the past, most Filipinos played games in Internet cafés with their friends after school. Memories like these are still fresh for most Filipino gamers, even within the YGG community. Just recently, one of our guild partners, NFT X-Street, was featured in the New York Times for setting up a Web3 gaming boot camp inspired by internet cafés.
Filipinos have always led the way in embracing new social and online products. It was true for Friendster, Facebook, and Clash of Clans, and it was definitely true for Axie Infinity. Combine this with the entrepreneurial mindset many Filipinos have, and blockchain gaming was perfect for the Filipino market.
The COVID-19 pandemic was also an adoption driver for Web3 gaming in the Philippines when job opportunities and government relief were limited. During this time, the play-to-earn movement really took off. We’ve been continuing what we started during the pandemic through the YGG Pilipinas Roadtrip, where we visit provinces across the country and educate attendees on how to get started in Web3 gaming.
3. The heart of Yield Guild Games is its community; how did your team build the YGG community? How strong would you say the community has grown, and how does your team intend to grow the project and keep users satisfied?
It goes back to how YGG got started. I met Jihoz, one of Axie Infinity’s five co-founders, back in 2018, and he gifted me some Axies to play with. I started breeding Axies, and I loaned Axies to others, and those players would pay me back once they started to earn in-game rewards. By the time YGG was formally founded, we were able to keep expanding organically, with more and more people “paying it forward” the same way I did in those early stages.
We really want every member of our community to feel like they’re part of something bigger. Even when times were tough during the bear market, our community stayed strong for each other. This is the foundation we’re building on, and it’s why we’re transitioning towards a guild protocol model. We want to enable our community to form their own guilds and empower them with our reputation system, our questing systems, and all the other infrastructure that they need to be successful.
We want to provide every gaming guild in Web3 with the same tools we use to enable gamers to build their on-chain reputation. If every Web3 gamer has access to these tools, working together for mutual gain will become much easier, and it will go a long way towards growing the Web3 ecosystem as a whole.
4. Having been a first-hand user of Web3, what are the major flaws of the technology, and where do you see it in the coming years?
The biggest issue I’ve found in Web3 is trust. Everyone in Web3 keeps trying to solve for liquidity, but reputation is the big unlock that will drive the space forward. That’s why we started using soulbound tokens (SBTs) to track and reward the achievements of our community members. This helps us solve one of the biggest problems in Web3, which is being able to distinguish between people who only extract value from those who create value for themselves and others.
In Web3, access to governance rewards revolves around yield farming. Things tend to boil down to serving the person who has the most money, which is not sustainable. Buying access shouldn’t be the only way to get your foot in the door in Web3. We want people to build their reputation through a well-designed achievement system and gain access to opportunities based on their accomplishments and contributions to the ecosystem. The more Web3 platforms adopt this approach, the closer we can get to unlocking a user-owned internet.
5. What are your plans for partnership, growth, and the future in general? Any alpha you would love to share with our readers?
YGG has always been a guild of guilds, but recently, we’ve been looking at how we can scale that even further. The first thing we’re working on is bringing all our guild partners on-chain. These Onchain Guilds (OGs) will be a Web3 primitive built on the concepts that helped us make YGG into what it is today — community and reputation. Making on-chain reputation accessible in this way will be a huge step forward in opening up opportunities in Web3.
This will allow YGG to become a truly human-centric ad platform, matching users with opportunities and games that are right for them instead of advertisements. Down the line, we want to continue partnering with more games, more guilds, and more communities in the space, inviting more and more people to our cause of expanding the Web3 gaming ecosystem.
