Yield Guild Games & the Crypto Gaming Metaverse with Gabby Dizon
Gabby Dizon shares the story of Yield Guild Games & how it is building financial inclusion across the world with play to earn games in the open metaverse.
Fresh out of the studio, Gabby Dizon, co-founder of Yield Guild Games (YGG) joined us in a conversation to share the origin story of YGG and how it builds the guilds with community managers and players to bring financial inclusion globally with play to earn crypto gaming. Gabby explained the role of YGG and how play to earn is transforming the gaming industry and what it means for the industry moving forward. Last but not least, Gabby offers his perspectives in the metaverse and what it means for the Web3 movement going forward.
"You're actually helping people, escape, lockdown, escape, poverty, and most of all, you're providing equal economic access to crypto based economies anywhere in the world. So now you don't have to be super crypto or tech savvy. What you really need is an internet connection in a device, in a crypto wallet, and you can start earning money. And if you don't know how to do that, your community managers are there to help you how to do it." - Gabby Dizon
Here are the links and show notes for this episode:
Introduction
- Gabby Dizon, co-founder of Yield Guild Games (@gabusch, Linkedin).
- As it is our tradition for first time guests to tell their origin story, how did you start your career that eventually led you to just before Yield Guild Games?
- What are the key lessons from your career journey that you can share with my audience?
Yield Guild Games (Whitepaper)
- BL’s intro: Yield Guild Games or YGG, is a play to earn gaming guild bringing players together to earn via blockchain based economies. Founded in the Philippines within Southeast Asia and recently, it has raised US$4.6m from the famous Silicon Valley firm, Andreessen Horowitz.
- To start, since my audience are mainly outside crypto, my first question to you: how do you introduce Yield Guild Games and its vision and mission to the man on the street and to the traditional gaming community?
- Reading your whitepaper, YGG is a decentralized autonomous organization or what people call DAOs these days for investing in non-fungible tokens or NFTs used in virtual worlds and blockchain based games, can you explain what a DAO is and how does YGG utilize that structure to further its value proposition?
- There is the YGG token, what is the function of the token and what does it mean for the person to hold a YGG token?
- YGG builds around the ecosystem of what we now know is play to earn games, for example, Axie Infinity and I just have Aleksander, one of the co-founders on the show, can you explain what play to earn game means in the context of blockchain gaming and give examples of the different games where YGG operate in?
- Based on the investment memo by Andressen Horowitz, they stated, “With 4,700+ scholars, and over $8.6 million earned, YGG is now paying out over $1 million weekly and already proving to be an unstoppable force for good.”, can you explain the concept of scholars in YGG, how does a scholar start in YGG and then earn as part of your ecosystem?
- How do you scale the scholarship program through the use of community managers? What are they empowered to do?
- As the COVID-19 pandemic swept Philippines last year, nearly 7.3 million people lost their jobs, can you talk about the story how you lend out your Axies that led to them able to earn a living during that period of time?
- Since YGG made investments into play to earn games, for example, Axie Infinity, League of Kingdoms, Guild of Guardians, can you explain your investment thesis and given the plethora of blockchain games popping up every week, how do you decide who to invest in, buy their tokens and NFTs?
- How sustainable is the play to earn model for ordinary people who come into gaming? Will there be a world where a lot of people are doing this for a living?
- In your point of view, how do you see the concept of the metaverse and how does YGG fit into that metaverse?
- Given more traditional players like Ubisoft, Activation-Blizzard or even Disney are entering the space through learning about NFTs, do you foresee a world that gaming communities will become interoperable instead of being siloed into their own worlds?
- Are we going into a world of Ready Player One and do you foresee VR and AR that will supercharge the play to earn ecosystem?
- What does great look like for YGG in a few years time?
Closing
- Any recommendations that have inspired you recently?
- Gabby's recommendations: Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, anything on Web3 and DAOs.
- How do my audience find you? (please feel free to plug your social media tools and your company’s as well)