“The revolution of NFT games is that gamers are the owners of their digital assets”
Exclusive TyN Magazine interview with Gabby Dizon, Co-Founder of Yield Guild Games. In the mobile gaming business since 2004, and in blockchain since 2018. He is co-founder of Altitude Games and developer of the blockchain game “Battle Racers”. Board member of the Blockchain Game Alliance and former President of the “Game Developers Association” of the Philippines.
1 – What are “play to earn” games? What do players have to know to be able to play them?
Play-to-earn gamers earn yield in the form of tokens or other rewards, by winning battles and completing tasks in NFT games.
Those rewards can be used in-game, or they can be traded on an open market, if the player chooses. The latter option represents an important shift in the gaming world, because traditionally, in-game assets were confined to centralized protocols and unable to be moved off the gaming platform.
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An example of a play-to-earn model is seen in Axie Infinity, where players are rewarded for completing daily tasks and winning battles. Players earn “Smooth Love Potion” (SLP) tokens in order to breed new Axies. Alternatively, they can trade or exchange SLP on an open marketplace for other cryptocurrencies.
Watch the Play-To-Earn: NFT gaming in the Philippines mini-documentary here.
2 – How did the blockchain improve the matrix of these games? And how are NFTs related to games?
Traditionally, players have been prohibited from selling or exchanging their in-game assets, even if they purchased or earned them.
In NFT games, in-game assets are wholly owned by the players—not the game’s developer.
Examples of gaming-based NFTs may include characters, plots of virtual land, weapons, and so on. These NFTs can be used inside blockchain games to earn yield in the form of tokens or other rewards. These rewards can be used in-game, or alternatively, traded outside the game for other cryptocurrencies via a decentralized exchange such as Uniswap.
So the players buy, sell and trade digital assets between themselves. The game publisher has nothing to do with it other than providing a decentralised marketplace to facilitate peer-to-peer trade between the players.
In this way, decentralised blockchain games give players ownership rights over their digital assets. This is the future of “player-owned economies” where the community brings, builds and maintains the value of an ecosystem.
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The amount of money that can be earned depends on several factors. This includes the player’s skill, how much time they spend playing the game, and their win rate. Another factor is the price movements of in-game tokens and assets on the open market.
3 – What is the business model for this type of game?
The scholarship idea was originally introduced by the Axie Infinity player community. Owners of Axies, the NFT pets that are required to play the game, would loan their assets to new players who didn’t own any Axies of their own.
With the rising popularity of Axie Infinity, the price to buy the NFT pets needed to play the game has increased significantly. This has created a barrier to entry for some players, especially those that are new to play-to-earn. Understandably, not all people are willing or able to invest in purchasing their own NFTs upfront.
As such, a scholarship is a popular pathway to onboard newcomers to NFT games. Yield Guild provides scholarships to new players as a profit-sharing model, where the guild invests in NFT assets and rents them to new players so they can start playing and earning in-game tokens without having to invest any money upfront.
The recipient of a scholarship is known as a scholar. The only upfront requirement of the scholar is their time spent playing the game, their enthusiasm and their willingness to learn.
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The scholar’s earnings are split between the scholar (70%), Yield Guild (10%), and the Community Manager (20%). The Community Manager is responsible for recruiting, training and mentoring the new player.
4 – What added value does Yield Guild Games have over the rest of the “play to earn” games?
In the gaming world, a guild is a community of players that regularly play together and collaborate for mutual benefit in one or multiplayer games.
Yield Guild Games (YGG) is a gaming guild that coordinates players around the world to earn crypto in play-to-earn games. It also invests in NFTs found in blockchain-based virtual economies, such as in-game assets and virtual land, and makes these available for guild members to borrow or lease.
En YGG estamos encantados de ver el crecimiento de “play to earn” en América Latina.
Realmente muestra que las oportunidades que brindan los juegos NFT y el juego para ganar son para todos, independientemente de la ubicación y datos demográficos. Esperamos incorporar a más jugadores para que se unan a la revolución de jugar para ganar.
Actualmente existen 60,000 miembros en la comunidad de YGG Discord y más de 4700 Axie scholars, que han cultivado más de 64 millones de SLP tokens hasta la fecha, con un valor total aproximado de $9.97 millones.
