YWhales: How YGG Runs an International Gaming Guild
YWhales host, Jay Steinback, speaks with Gabby Dizon of Yield Guild Games to learn how the guild selects its game partners and manages its portfolio of game assets.
The YWhales podcast discusses insights into the fast-evolving, fast-growing crypto space. It is hosted by YWhales, a group of international C-level business executives who are experts in all things crypto, blockchain and Web 3.0.
In this episode, YWhales founder, Jay Steinback, and Yield Guild Games (YGG) co-founder, Gabby Dizon, discuss how YGG selects games to acquire assets in, who manages these assets, and what it takes to run an international guild.
The following is an excerpt from the podcast. Watch the full episode on Vimeo or listen to it on Spotify.
Yield Guild Games with Gabby Dizon – YWhales: Business People Talking the Business of Crypto
Jay (23:00): How do you guys determine which games? Just anything? Or does it have to have a little bit of depth?
Gabby (23:07): We have specific criteria as a guild. First, we want to see that games have a long-term sustainable economy. Unlike speculators, or even with VCs — whose goal is to buy tokens for as low as possible, and someday, in the future, sell them for as high as possible — we have a much more long-term view on the games that we invest in because we buy the NFT assets that these players use to play within these games.
We have to make sure that the economies we're buying into are sustainable. Otherwise, the NFTs we have will be dead in a few years. We take a look at how the virtual economies are set up in these games, how the tokenomics are structured, how players are earning rewards. Who's paying for them? And is there an ability for a guild to come in and buy $1 million worth of assets in a game and be able to lend them out safely — similar to the scholarship program — to its guild members?
Jay (24:07): When you're talking about lending these things out, you guys have hundreds of millions of dollars, potentially, of NFTs. Who manages all that? Is there an armor-type person that's looking for where these are? And how do I make sure that they're logged?
Gabby (24:25): We have a game operations team that are the gameplay experts for each game. The jobs in the real world are getting more and more specific. We have a breeding master whose job is to breed Axie Infinity pets. We have people managing lands in strategy games. And, over time, we'll have people who will be manning the spaceships in Star Atlas so that our players can use them.
Jay (24:57): What other random positions do you have, or things that people are doing? Because that’s just fascinating to think about, the logistics. Do you have staff?
Gabby (25:08): We do have staff. There's a core team of around 25 people who work on the operations, on the development, on the business side. We do have a lot of community contributors as well. A lot of our hires have also come from the community.
Jay (25:25): That's fabulous. The first section you were talking about is in terms of the width and the depth that it takes to run an international gaming guild. But what is the scale in numbers, if you can help with some metrics around that?
Gabby (25:44): For example, in Axie Infinity alone, there are over 35,000 Axies. We are managing over $1 billion AUM for a one-year-old DAO in both NFTs and tokens. We've paid out over $11 million in Axie Infinity to our player community, most of them from developing regions, such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Venezuela, where $200 goes a long, long way. We have over 6,000 Axie scholars, so people who are using our Axie Infinity assets earn a living from the game.
Jay (26:21): You could be easily one of the most innovative entries to blockchain and crypto gateways that are out there for second- and third-world countries. You see people leave gaming and go off into other sectors of Web3. Clearly, you are changing lives for the better by teaching them through gaming.
Gabby (26:47): Yeah, absolutely. Our unofficial motto is “turning gamers into investors.” We don’t want them to just keep playing Axie Infinity and earning SLP. We want them to turn that SLP, for example, into Ethereum or Bitcoin. Maybe they’ll buy more Axies so that they can lend them out to their family members, or they can buy virtual land in Axie Infinity and be a landowner in the Metaverse.
The most powerful thing in this job that we have in the guild is seeing people come in as scholars with no money start to play the game — with a few cycles, they pay off their debts, put food on the table, pay for medical bills, and then, after a few months, they start having excess funds and start having savings for the first time in their entire lives. And what this gives them is a sense of control over their lives, where they actually have the power to make decisions for their future. And that’s not something you can do by just giving money. You’re giving people the agency so they can build better lives for themselves and their families through investing in crypto assets. That’s the power of play-to-earn.
You can watch the full episode on Vimeo or listen to it on Spotify.
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