thedefiant.io
Yield Guild Games (YGG), the web3 gaming guild that pioneered play-to-earn gaming, is sunsetting its game publishing arm YGG Play, affecting 35 jobs, co-founder Gabby Dizon said on X Monday.
YGG will pay departing staff eight additional weeks during the transition and help them find new roles, Dizon said. YGG Play's games, including LOL Land and Waifu Sweeper, and the YGG Play platform itself, will stay live until July 31 before going offline. GIGACHAD BAT will move to delabs Official, while Ragnarok Breaker will continue under Planetarium HQ, according to Dizon's post.
YGG's official account confirmed the decision separately, framing it as "a market decision, not a product decision" driven by "the realities of the broader macroeconomic climate" rather than any failure of YGG Play's "Casual Degen gaming thesis." The unit built the YGG Play Launchpad and worked with major IPs before its shutdown, the company said.
What's Next For YGG
Going forward, Dizon said YGG will operate with a smaller team, returning to its original model of working directly with its gaming community, and expanding into a new line of business: selling player-generated training data to AI labs. The company described its future as a continuation of its "play-to-earn roots, but in a different form."
YGG built its brand during the 2021 P2E boom around Axie Infinity scholarships and later diversified into a broader publishing business as the play-to-earn model cooled, a shift The Defiant covered as the guild weathered previous bear-market pressure.
The YGG Play unit's closure marks the guild's most significant restructuring since that period, cutting a division built to publish original web3 titles rather than manage token-based guild scholarships.