Where Yield Guild Games Stands Right Now
I want to talk to you about YGG like I’m talking to a friend who went through the 2021 play-to-earn storm, stepped away for a while, and is now asking, “So… is Yield Guild Games still alive?”
Yes, it is. But it doesn’t look like the YGG you remember. The noisy hype is gone. The scholarships pumping one game are no longer the whole story. Now we’re seeing something quieter, more deliberate, and honestly more grown up.
Under the surface, YGG is trying to become not just a guild you join, but a set of rails that many guilds, games, and players can stand on together. That’s the “fresh” part of the update. It is not sexy like fast candles, but it is deep.
From Play-To-Earn Mania To A Second Life
Back in 2021, YGG’s identity was simple: the biggest play-to-earn guild in the world. It bought NFTs for games like Axie, lent them to scholars, and shared the in-game rewards. For people in places like the Philippines, the income was real and emotional; some families survived lockdowns because somebody in the house was grinding a game through a YGG scholarship.
Then the music stopped. Game economies cracked. Token prices collapsed. The same structure that lifted people up also exposed them to brutal drawdowns. YGG’s token fell far from its old highs; as of now it trades in the low-cent range with a market cap around fifty million dollars, a shadow of its peak.
That kind of fall hurts. It shakes trust. It makes people feel foolish for believing. And yet, instead of disappearing, the team chose the hard road: admit the old model wasn’t enough and rebuild on top of the lessons. They’re clearly designing “YGG 2.0” for a longer game.
The Big Turn: Onchain Guilds
The first big pivot is something called Onchain Guilds.
YGG launched Onchain Guilds as a platform where communities and guilds can coordinate and prove contributions directly on chain. It runs on Base, Coinbase’s Layer 2, so transactions are cheaper and faster, which matters when you’re tracking lots of small quests, badges, and interactions.
Instead of one giant guild trying to manage everything, Onchain Guilds let many different groups organize, set rules, and share ownership of their digital assets and achievements. In simple emotional language: YGG is saying, “You don’t just have to join our guild. You can build your own guild, but we’ll give you the tools.”
This isn’t just talk. In mid-2025, YGG moved 50 million YGG tokens, worth roughly 7.5 million dollars, into a new Ecosystem Pool controlled by its Onchain Guild system. The pool is meant to fund strategies, support guilds, and actually work the treasury instead of letting it sit idle.
For me, that move feels like a line in the sand. If It becomes normal for YGG to use its own capital this actively, it can turn its treasury from “a bag we hope goes up” into “a machine that strengthens the whole network.” That is a big emotional shift from speculation to stewardship.
YGG Play: From Renting Space To Helping Build Worlds
The second pillar of the new YGG is YGG Play, its publishing arm. This is where the project is trying to step into the role of a partner and architect for games, not just a tenant.
On May 23, 2025, YGG launched YGG Play together with its first title, LOL Land, a browser game built as a “casual degen” board-game style experience. Players roll through themed boards, collect points, unlock NFTs, and compete for rewards from a very real pool of YGG tokens. It has already generated millions in revenue and brought in a strong base of players, proving YGG can drive traffic and spend to a game it helps publish.
Then came the first external publishing deal: Gigaverse, a pixel RPG. YGG Play signed it as its first third-party partner, with revenue sharing written straight into smart contracts. Developers get their share in real time, and the guild can plug in creators, events, and crossovers.
LOL Land has also become a canvas for culture. In 2025, YGG Play and the Pudgy Penguins team launched an Asia-themed “Pengu Wonderland” map, tying the game to a live event in Bali and bringing communities together in a way that feels fun, not strictly financial.
We’re seeing YGG move from “We show up after your game is live and send scholars” to “We’re in the room when the game is designed, the token model is drawn, and the event plan is written.” That deeper involvement means they carry more responsibility, but it also means they can fight for healthier, more sustainable economies from the start.
GAP: The Quest Era That Had To End
If you ever joined YGG quests, you probably remember GAP: the Guild Advancement Program.
GAP was like a long, living storyline. Season after season, members did quests across many web3 games, earned points, and claimed tokens and NFTs. More importantly, they earned on-chain badges and achievements that could not be sold, only earned. That gave people pride. It said, “You were here. You did this.”
In 2025, YGG launched GAP Season 10, added six new games including LOL Land, and then made a bittersweet announcement: this would be the final season. The team extended S10 into August 2025 to give people more time, then shifted focus away from the old quest map and toward YGG Play and the Onchain Guild ecosystem.
There’s something emotional about that. When a program that defined the rhythm of a community ends, it feels like graduating and losing your classroom at the same time. But beneath the sadness, there is logic. YGG realized the old quest structure wasn’t enough to carry the weight of a full publishing business and protocol. So they chose to close a chapter with respect instead of letting it slowly decay.
The spirit of GAP lives on in the idea of on-chain reputation. Soulbound-style badges and contributor history are being rewired into the Onchain Guild infrastructure and YGG Play’s systems, so your past actions will still matter in whatever comes next.
Money, Pain, And The Token Reality
Let’s not pretend everything is perfect. YGG’s token story is full of emotion.
During the first hype wave, the token soared. Now, years later, the price is much lower, trading under ten cents with hundreds of millions of tokens circulating and the rest vesting over time. Daily volume still runs in the tens of millions of dollars across exchanges, with Binance as a key venue for liquidity, but the chart shows a long, hard winter after the early mania.
In 2025, instead of just watching the price, YGG started buying back some of its own tokens and then redirected a big chunk into that 50-million-YGG Ecosystem Pool. The combination of buybacks and active capital use is a signal: they’re trying to treat YGG like a living balance sheet, not just a lottery ticket.
If you are someone who held through the pain, I won’t sugarcoat it. It hurts to see numbers so far from the top. But part of the emotional maturity of this new phase is accepting that “number go down” happened, and you can either hide from that or use it as motivation to build a model that doesn’t depend on permanent hype.
How This Feels From Inside The Community
Imagine three different people.
First, a player in Southeast Asia who once paid family bills with Axie earnings. That person looks at YGG now and sees familiar faces, but a different structure. Instead of only scholarships, there are new games like LOL Land, new events, and the chance to earn through reputation and quests tied to publishing deals. For them, hope is quieter, more cautious. They’re asking, “Can this really last this time?”
Second, a small guild leader. They’ve been running a community in Discord for years, organizing raids, testing games nobody’s heard of yet. Onchain Guilds give them tools: to track contributions, to access support from the Ecosystem Pool, to stand under a bigger umbrella without losing their identity. For this person, YGG’s evolution feels like an invitation: “You are not just a sub-role in our server. You can bring your whole guild into a larger universe.”
Third, a tired investor. They remember buying YGG when GameFi was the hottest word on Crypto Twitter. They may feel embarrassed, angry, or numb. When they read about YGG Play, Gigaverse, buybacks, and ecosystem funds, part of them feels skeptical. Another part quietly thinks, “If they really turn this into infrastructure, maybe this wasn’t all for nothing.”
I’m telling you this because the emotional truth is as important as the technical one. This project is made of people carrying regret, hope, stubbornness, and a belief that digital work deserves more dignity than a line in a corporate database.
What To Watch Next Without Losing Yourself
If you care about YGG’s next chapter, there are a few threads that really matter more than daily price candles.
Watch whether Onchain Guilds actually get used by real communities on Base, not just in announcements.
Watch whether YGG Play can keep turning games like LOL Land and Gigaverse into real revenue, not one-off flashes.
Watch how the 50-million-YGG Ecosystem Pool is deployed over time. Is it going into shallow incentives or into deep, long-term guild and game relationships that strengthen the network’s spine?
And most of all, watch the mood of the community. Are people still organizing events, teaching newcomers, testing new games, and showing up for summits and launches? Or is the energy only there when a token airdrop is on the line?
If We’re seeing deeper participation when markets are flat, that’s a sign of real culture. If everything goes silent when price action cools, that’s a warning sign.
A Soft, Honest Ending
Yield Guild Games today is not the golden rocket ship people once believed it was. It is something more fragile and, I think, more human: a project that flew too close to the sun, crashed, and is now slowly rebuilding its wings with better materials.
There is something powerful about a community that refuses to vanish after the charts turn red. The founders, contributors, and players are still trying to answer one simple question:
Who should own the value created inside digital worlds – only the companies, or also the people who live their time there?
If It becomes normal for guilds to own land, items, revenue streams, and brand power together, if YGG’s rails truly help millions of players move from “user” to “co-owner”, then this messy, painful journey will have meant something bigger than a token price.
Until then, YGG stands in the middle of its story, not at the end. A little bruised, a little wiser, still building.
And maybe that’s the most honest place a project can be: not promising you the moon, just inviting you to help decide what this new kind of guild can grow into, one game, one quest, one shared world at a time.
