Yield Guild Games

Yield Guild Games (YGG) is a Web3 gaming guild founded in the Philippines in 2020 by Gabby Dizon and Beryl Li. It built a community-owned model for lending blockchain game assets — originally Axie Infinity NFTs, which were expensive to buy outright — to Filipino players known as “scholars,” who could then earn income from the game without paying the upfront cost themselves.

YGG organizes as a DAO: holders of its YGG token vote on treasury allocation and community decisions, and the guild later expanded into regional and game-specific “SubDAOs” as well as its own publishing arm, YGG Play, to support a broader portfolio of Web3 games beyond Axie Infinity.

The scholar model made YGG one of the most visible Filipino-led stories in global crypto during the 2021 play-to-earn boom, but it is honest to note the model’s real limits: as Axie Infinity’s in-game token lost most of its value in the years that followed, many scholars’ reported earnings fell sharply from their 2021 peak — a widely documented downside of the play-to-earn model, not just a success story.

Blockchain games like Axie Infinity required players to buy expensive NFT characters before they could start earning anything, which locked out most Filipinos who wanted to participate in play-to-earn gaming but couldn't afford the entry cost.

YGG solved this by owning a shared pool of game NFTs and lending them to scholars in exchange for a share of what they earned in-game.

Filipino (and later international) players who want to participate in blockchain games without buying NFT assets themselves, plus Web3 game developers looking to reach an organized player community through YGG Play.

YGG was one of the first and largest scholarship guilds of its kind, with DAO-based governance rather than a single corporate owner, and it evolved from a single-game lending model into a broader Web3 gaming publisher (YGG Play) as the play-to-earn model itself matured and its economics shifted.