ION Analytics: How YGG Turns Gamers into Leaders
Beryl and ION Analytics’ Giovanni Amodeo discuss how YGG evolved its rewards-sharing model into a platform where players discover games, connect with communities, and upskill to become leaders.
ION Analytics is a fintech platform that offers data, editorial content and analytics to help users find opportunities in markets such as equities, fixed income and infrastructure. One of its products, Mergermarket, delivers exclusive merger and acquisitions intelligence powered by AI-driven predictive analytics and presents in-depth profiles of key industry participants.
ION Analytics Chief Data Officer Giovanni Amodeo invited YGG’s co-founder Beryl Li to talk about how the guild evolved to focus more on decentralized reputation to help guild members prove their skill and credibility on-chain. Beryl discussed how, early on, the guild prioritized its unbanked users, developing initiatives that emphasized educating the community about ownership of their assets and tokens. She also explained how the guild has now become a platform that connects gamers with shared interests, enabling them to explore games, join tournaments, and contribute to the community through different roles.
In the following excerpt, Beryl describes how YGG provides avenues, such as the Guild Advancement Program (GAP) and Superquests, where guild members discover games, upskill themselves, and build their on-chain reputation. Beryl and Giovanni also discuss the important role of influencers in forming this community of knowledgeable web3 participants.
Watch Beryl’s full interview on the ION Analytics website.
ION Analytics: Beryl Li, Founder of Yield Guild Games, on the development of Web3 community
Beryl (07:55): The idea of decentralized reputation was important to us. So, we started building a platform or products that help our community upskill themselves within the Metaverse, to tap into these opportunities in web3.
When we say “community members,” the idea has grown from just being a gamer to being an influencer, a manager, a community ambassador. There are many roles within a gaming community that grow from just being a consumer-gamer. There's also the idea of a competitive gamer, like esports, and organizers. There are so many roles that came out from just playing with assets.
We built two kinds of products, called Superquests and also the GAP, our Guild Advancement Program, which is a set of challenges that try to improve and upskill these various roles. So, later on, they can be recruited within a game to be a moderator there, and so on and so forth.
Superquests is very much focused on engagement within the game. It's very much integrated with a game and it's like a tutorial. There's a level-up system where you can build your profile. Every time you complete a certain level or task within Superquests, you're rewarded with tokens, and you get a badge later on, a non-fungible token (NFT). That profiling system happens when you jump from one game to another and keep building your profile, earning all these badges. That data of badges says so much about you, like which level are you in, how many hours you end up playing the game, what programs have you gone through to develop your skills, and so on.
In the future, it opens up and explores other forms of decentralized applications that can be integrated, such as other forms of uncollateralized loans, for instance, insurance products for community members. There's a magnitude of ideas that can proliferate from this.
Giovanni (15:32): You talked about influencers earlier. What is the era of influencers? Is it just within the community, or do you hope to achieve more with them?
Beryl (15:44): Influencers could eventually be your tutors or your managers later on. But these would be leaders within the community. They've been players for a while; they've earned respect from the community. They have a lot of influence in their decision-making.
When they launch a YouTube video or a livestream of how they play, it just attracts a number of players that want to learn from them and want to explore with that potential leader. And so we actually choose these leaders and then we approach them.
For instance, our new Superquest product, when we launched the challenges for Axie Infinity, we partnered with Kookoo and spamandrice. These are two really famous influencers in the Axie Infinity space. And we did a closed-door workshop with them.
We had like a number of signups for them. We had like maybe 4,500 sign-ups in total, for both spamandrice and Kookoo, and they showcased a tutorial video. A lot of players try to learn from them. They managed to complete certain levels and achieved being able to retrieve the rewards at the end of the program.
You can watch the full recording on the ION Analytics website.
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