The Defiant Podcast: Developing the Essential Toolkit for Web3 SMEs
Gabby returns to The Defiant Podcast to speak with host Camila Russo about how YGG is equipping guilds to grow from friends playing games together to enterprises that can compete in a new economy.
The web3 gaming landscape has changed significantly since YGG co-founder Gabby Dizon last made an appearance on The Defiant Podcast in 2021. Throughout the years, YGG has remained steadfast in its mission of connecting individuals in web3 to opportunities for growth, significantly boosting its own raw metrics to evolve from being a guild into a protocol supporting guilds.
Recently, Gabby returned to The Defiant Podcast and spoke with its host, The Defiant co-founder Camila Russo, about why YGG’s transition into a guild protocol stands to benefit the entire web3 gaming ecosystem. Gabby described the transition as a way to further empower individuals in web3 to pursue common goals together by organizing into guilds. Just as small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) foster economic growth and account for the majority of web2’s job market, guilds can serve a similar purpose in web3.
With this goal in mind, YGG is making the tools and infrastructure that have enabled it to scale available to all web3 guilds. This includes access to multisig treasury wallets, verifiable member lists, and YGG’s reputation-based achievement system. Updates to the Guild Advancement Program (GAP) show how guilds can leverage questing to build specialized communities, with GAP Season 5 creating a new category for community-focused quests, called “bounties,” to reinforce upskilling and progression within the wider ecosystem. All these tools will enable guilds to grow from groups of friends playing games together into full-blown enterprises ready to maximize the opportunities web3 offers.
The following is an excerpt from Gabby’s conversation with Camila on The Defiant podcast, where Gabby discusses what YGG’s transition into a guild protocol entails, as well as how he hopes this transition will empower guilds to find sustainable success in the web3 gaming landscape.
Listen to the full recording on YouTube.
The Defiant Podcast: YGG's Guild Protocol, Onchain Reputation, And The Next Wave Of Web3 Gaming With Gabby Dizon
Camila (14:45): Before we get deeper into this reputation system, I wanted to ask you about a couple of criticisms that I usually hear about Axie. This idea that you mentioned, that gamers are playing Axie just because they want to earn the different associated tokens, not because the game is fun in itself. What do you think about that criticism, that it's more broadly about play-to-earn than Axie itself?
Gabby (15:28): Yeah, it's probably the most common criticism of play-to-earn itself, starting with Axie, but with the entire space. How I would reply to that is, number one, a game has to be fun. A game has to be fun for people to come and play it. Earnings are there as a way to incentivize people to do certain actions. Pixels is actually a great example of this. People can earn the PIXEL token in the game, but it's also a very social game.
For example, my dad, who's over 70, plays for a couple of hours every day. My sister is playing. My brother is playing. We formed a little guild where we're actually farming together. And of course, the earning part is good because it gives us a goal to achieve together. But earning is not the point of us playing the game. It's because we're doing something as a family. We're now all adults, and this is the first time we've actually played a game together, and that's very enjoyable.
If you see this in airdrops or any campaign, earnings are a way to attract people to your product, and that is one of the biggest strengths of crypto. But what gets them to stay is the application itself, whether it's a game or anything else. So a good game will use earnings as a way to get people into the game, but how that economy is designed, what people will spend on, how people will stay and enjoy is really up to how well the game is made.
Camila (17:08): And do you think that web3 games are at that stage? Are they able to compete, in terms of how fun they are, with web2 games?
Gabby (17:20): Absolutely. I do think so. Two of my favorite games right now are Pixels and Parallel. Again, Pixels is a casual farming game that is available on the Ronin network, and then Parallel is a trading card game that is available on Base. These are games that I think can compete with any web2 game on how enjoyable they are to play. They also have the added power of web3 mechanics, earning mechanics, and digital ownership that I think makes them stand out from web2 games.
Camila (17:56): And then you started to get into what this transition to becoming a protocol is. Can you talk a bit deeper about that? What exactly does it mean? What changes in YGG for it to become a protocol?
Gabby (18:19): People thought of us as a guild, meaning that we bring players together and we bring them into games. That's still true, but we are not the ones who are playing the games ourselves. We organize people and give them the tools and the platform to be able to do this in a scalable manner. That's what a guild protocol is. There's different components to that.
One is that we have the quest and achievement system that I was talking about earlier that can bring people and communities into games and then build their gamer reputation onchain. Second is that we have the assets in these different games that can enhance people's experience when playing them. Third is that we have the community of gamers — or the DeFi parlance for it is “player liquidity” — that we give to the games. There's many different types of liquidity in crypto. Most of it is financial, but we're probably the biggest source of player liquidity in all of web3.
And then the fourth one, which we are releasing in a few months, is called Onchain Guilds. It's a way for guilds to build their identity onchain, and it's composed of a multisig wallet, a membership list, and the ability to go into quests as a guild, not as an individual. So having your guild identity onchain, I think, is an essential part of being a protocol. And taking all of that together, that is what makes YGG a guild protocol.
You can listen to the full recording on YouTube.
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