Blockcrunch Podcast: YGG Is Building the First Guild Protocol
YGG co-founder Gabby Dizon joins Tangent co-founder and Blockcrunch podcast host Jason Choi to discuss how web3 games and their communities can prosper through the formation of guilds.
Through its reputation-based guild infrastructure, YGG is making it easier and more rewarding for groups of friends with genuine interest in web3 games to grow their ranks and work toward bigger goals together. Just like the guilds that dominated MMORPGs like World of Warcraft in years past, these organically formed communities will be the lifeblood of web3 moving forward.
YGG has always served as a bridge between gamers and web3 games, enabling people to explore different community roles and develop their skills in the open Metaverse. As it transitions into a guild protocol, YGG aims to bring more web3 communities onchain so they can access a wider selection of opportunities based on their members’ verifiable credentials.
Recently, YGG co-founder Gabby Dizon joined Tangent co-founder and Blockcrunch podcast host Jason Choi to discuss what YGG’s transition into a guild protocol means to the rest of the web3 gaming ecosystem. Through its questing platforms, particularly the Guild Advancement Program (GAP), YGG has developed a reputation system built around soulbound tokens (SBTs) earned by finishing quests and bounties tied to games and community contributions. These have enabled YGG to encourage members to work toward entering various leadership roles within their communities, or even take up content creation or game testing on the side.
The following is an excerpt from Gabby’s appearance on the Blockcrunch podcast, where he and Jason talk about the difference between community building and user acquisition, how organic communities in web2 have evolved in web3, and how these communities are empowered to work together toward common goals in web3.
Listen to the full recording on YouTube.
Blockcrunch Podcast: YGG Is Building the First Guild Protocol - Gabby Dizon, Ep. 257
Gabby (15:23): There's a lot of talk on community building and user acquisition, and I think people confuse the two. Community building is not like points farming, “Let's get a lot of people talking on Twitter as much as possible.” If you do all of that social attention without the underlying interest in the game, that actually won't last, especially if people were just there to make money. Once they make their money, they're going to leave.
We've always been about building organic communities under the games. That's why with the Guild Advancement Program (GAP), the absolute numbers might not look very high. That's because we start from the bottom of the funnel up, rather than top of the funnel down, which means that we look for people that are interested in the game. We form social groups around them — guilds, communities — and then they do different things that make the community prosper.
Of course, playing the game is part of them. Forming guilds is another part of them, because recruiting people in the guild means that the retention is a lot more sticky. And then people become content creators. We created a Facebook group called Everything Pixels, so that it will be a channel for people who want to learn more about the game. We also have an in-house content creator. And we've also created several quests with the Guild Advancement Program and a Superquest, which is a very integrated type of quest to teach people about the guild system inside of Pixels.
Jason (16:51): You say “quest” — just for people who are not familiar, this is when you reward people who play the game or carry out certain actions with tokens, right?
Gabby (17:00): Yeah, that's right. So for people who do something within the game, once they reach the objective, they get rewarded. It might be in in-game resources, it might be in reputation with soulbound token badges, and it might be rewards with tokenized assets, whether it's tokens or NFTs.
Jason (17:18): How much of this was from lessons you learned in the web2 gaming world? Because when I look at web2, I'm not sure if there are quests or guilds that work so hands-on in games. And most of the time when I hear about social communities in web2 games, it's always organic, like a subreddit that someone started. So, what are the biggest lessons from web2 carrying over to web3? And what are the biggest differences there?
Gabby (17:44): Early on, I was part of a World of Warcraft guild. That really showed me that different people working together with different skills can combine to form something that is greater than the sum of its parts. If you've ever been part of a guild before, you have the tank, you have the carry, you have the healer, you have the mage, you have the rogue, and you have someone who's probably keeping everything together like a Guild Master. All of these roles means that it's a lot more enjoyable to play together and help each other in the whole experience.
Coming into web3, a lot of my early experience in community building is actually informed by Axie Infinity. Axie is very misunderstood, because even then, in 2021, a lot of experienced game developers looked at the game and said, “This is a very simple game. I could recreate this in a couple of weeks.” But a lot of the innovation was actually because of the bottom-up innovation that was happening. As I said earlier, scholarships weren't created by Axie, it was created by the community. So having these permissionless assets and helping people build value on top of them was really the greatest value that I learned from being part of the Axie community.
You can listen to the full recording on the Blockcrunch YouTube.
Follow Gabby and Jason for more macro-level discussions on the latest web3 trends and innovations.
Join the YGG Discord or follow us on X for future updates.