YGG Spaces: Shaping the Gaming Landscape Together
Gabby Dizon joins Kate Irwin, Luke Paglia, Sandeep Nailwal and Urvit Goel in a Spaces event to discuss YGG’s collaboration with My Pet Hooligan and Polygon for GAP Season 4.
Yield Guild Games (YGG) has recently introduced Season 4 of its Guild Advancement Program (GAP), building upon community feedback and insights from previous seasons. This season includes over 150 quests across 12 games, with new additions to the roster including the GTA-meets-Pixar shooter, My Pet Hooligan (MPH). An early partner of AMGI Studios, the studio behind My Pet Hooligan, YGG has been extending support across various initiatives in the lead-up to the game’s public release. The two organizations have also received funding from Polygon, which has backed YGG's GAP initiative and the Alpha 2.0 Turbo launch of My Pet Hooligan.
In this Spaces event led by Kate Irwin, Gaming Lead Reporter of Decrypt and Creative Producer of GG by Decrypt, YGG co-founder Gabby Dizon was joined by AMGI Studios COO Luke Paglia, Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal, and Polygon VP and Head of Global Business Development Urvit Goel in conversation about how Polygon's collaborations with platforms like ImmutableX are facilitating web3 games. They also touched on YGG-partnered games in Alpha and Beta stages, including the highly anticipated upcoming public release of My Pet Hooligan, and the importance of partnering with industry experts to refine the game development process.
The following excerpt is taken from the Spaces event, where the speakers discuss how YGG is facilitating exposure and expanding the reach of games like My Pet Hooligan through its questing system, and how Polygon is providing support for initiatives like these from an infrastructure perspective. Listen to the full recording on X.
YGG Spaces: Shaping the Gaming Landscape Together (Web3)
Kate (10:46): I want to hear your thoughts as well, Gabby. I know YGG has been super active across so many web3 games because I saw you guys on the leaderboard in Gran Saga: Unlimited as well, and I was like, “Oh, hey, I know those people.”
Gabby (10:59): We want to bring our community to where the most fun games are in web3 — that’s why you are seeing us active in a lot of different games. And we have structured a lot of that in these questing programs that we are doing, and oftentimes, when we design a quest, we want to get the input of the game and see what their goals are. So for My Pet Hooligan — and Luke can talk more about this — we wanted to see more people creating content around the game and just showing other people how fun it could be.
Luke (11:35): Jumping in with YGG from the get-go has been really great. In order to build something like this with a game in a new space, it doesn’t happen in a vacuum and it doesn't happen from just one person. You need to bring all the best minds together, especially in a dynamic space like this that's constantly changing. There's always new innovation, there are always new hurdles to get over. And the folks at YGG have been a really great wealth of knowledge as they've gone down their path — and doing what they're doing, looking at it from their lens and their perspective on how we're doing, and saying, “Hey, guys, here's what we'd like to do. How do we work together? How do we work this in?” And we have a really nice push and pull.
And just from a partnership perspective, that's what you really want to have in a strategic partnership — somebody who can bring knowledge to the table and understand how your goals are matched with what they can bring and design together. So Gabby, Jeff and everyone at YGG has been nothing but incredible. For Season 4 of the GAP that’s already kicked off, what you guys have all done there is really cool. Gabby and I were chatting a couple of months ago about what the priorities of MPH are going forward and how we integrate guilds into it in a really productive way that’s a win-win for both.
When we designed this game, we wanted user-generated content (UGC) to be a big part of it, because from the gameplay that we have — the battling, in-game skateboarding, the smooth cameras, the avatar that pops up in the corner — this thing is geared to be a content creator’s dream, to be able to create stuff here and have people who game or don’t game enjoy what they are watching, it needs to be exciting and engaging. So when chatting with Gabby, we realized the best way was to get that grassroots exposure by having people come in, play it, actually enjoy the play, and show how much fun it is to play the game — so the quest is a great way to do so. I know there are a lot of cool things you can earn through doing it and we are excited to have this kick off.
Kate (15:20): I would love to also bring Polygon into the conversation and get everyone’s thoughts on the broader state of crypto gaming and where it's going. There's been a lot of conversation between play-to-earn gaming versus web3 gaming versus just gaming. I was wondering if you had thoughts on those differences and where you see Polygon positioning itself.
Urvit (16:04): I got to play My Pet Hooligan at GDC, and Kate, you had mentioned “more fun than Fortnite” — I had a blast playing it. So one of my theses that I've publicly kind of come out and said is that there will be a moment in time when blockchain-enabled games will be equally fun, if not better than, the games out there today.
But that is a thesis, so if you believe that — and we're starting to see the genesis of it. Gabby mentioned this new partnership happened a year ago, so these things take time, but we're starting to see the quality increase. And so, if you believe that, then you have to go to the next thing, which is you have a bunch of players paying lots of money in games not to own anything. And if you have a great game or two equivalent experiences — one that allows you to own your assets and another that doesn't — my thesis and the Polygon thesis is folks will gravitate to the game that allows you to own your items. And what I mean by that is ownership is going to provide lots of interesting mechanics that players will be able to take advantage of.
Going back to Gabby talking about questing and the integration — questing, at the end of the day, is very similar to what's in web2 today around incentivized ads, right? So, for all of us that have played a mobile game — “Watch an ad to get more gems,” or, “an extra turn.” What's the game doing? It's trying to monetize, which drives additional attention. But now you come into this environment with YGG and My Pet Hooligan and we're creating quests. Now it's actually fun to go down the other engagement paths, which increases engagement for the developer and is more fun for the end user. And at the end of it, you earn an asset that may or may not have significant value over time and allows you to enjoy the game in different ways in addition to having secondary value in the market.
Kate (18:42): And what are you seeing right now, Sandeep, in terms of gaming activity on Polygon? I think some folks are curious about what those numbers look like right now, if any patterns or spikes have emerged when different games launch, and what that activity looks like.
Sandeep (19:06): In terms of the overall activity on the blockchain, we continue to see a lot of games doing decent numbers, but aggregate, for Polygon, generally, we see 300,000 to 350,000 daily active users, which is more than the Ethereum main chain itself. And I'm guessing a large number of them come from individual games and if any one of these games is experiencing explosive growth.
There are a few initial surges that keep on coming with various games, but we’ve not seen any particular game that has seen a very high, explosive growth trajectory. I think that is overall the whole scene in the crypto gaming ecosystem, currently. There are very good teams — some of them are like My Pet Hooligan who are constantly shipping and organically growing their communities — but I think we are still awaiting multiple Axie Infinity-like mega-blockbuster kinds of games. And I think we are approaching those timelines in the next six to eight months, but overall, in terms of the interest of people, we keep seeing a huge number of people building on Polygon.
You can listen to the full recording on X.
To participate in GAP Season 4 quests, including those in My Pet Hooligan, visit the YGG dapp.
Follow Gabby, Luke, Sandeep, Urvit and Kate to learn more about web3 gaming and the Metaverse.
Join the YGG Discord or follow us on X for future updates.