Gabby Dizon. Welcome. Hey, thanks for having me. Yeah, it's been a long time. But I've been watching you guys from the sidelines and Yield Guild is doing some amazing things. You guys have been building in the bear, had an event recently. We'd love to hear all of that. But first, I want to get to a really important question. So recently there was a, you know, we had the holidays and I imagine you spent a lot of time with family. When you're with your family, and I know a lot of them are gamers, But pretend like you're speaking to a family member that doesn't know anything about what you do. How do you explain Yield Guild to them? I told them that we get people together so that they can play games and have the opportunity to make some money and own assets while playing games. That's pretty much it. I love that. And that's you didn't even mention crypto or Web3 in there. That's good. Do they ask you follow up questions after that? that's really nice. But I heard that you do this blockchain thing. What is that? Yeah, then we can tell them that the money that they can earn while playing games is in the form of crypto. So that's typically where it comes in. Got it. Very cool. That's always an important question to ask, because, you know, when you're trying to explain what you do to like a normal person, not someone in your industry, using language that they wouldn't understand is really important, especially I imagine it is too for gamers and non-gamers alike. well, recently, Yield Guild had a big event in November 2024. And I imagine there's just been a lot of excitement and growth from that. Maybe we can start there. Can you tell us a little bit about what led to that event and some of the things that some activations maybe that you guys were hoping to achieve? Yeah, we held the YGG Play Summit in Manila last November. And this is the third year we've done an event in the Philippines. And it's to kind of have a get together of a lot of the top Web3 games and along with the community members, content creators, eSports players, and showing them what is basically a game event, except that everything is Web3. We don't emphasize on the Web3 portion of it. So there's games, content creation, competitive tournaments, but it's showing a future where the Web3 is just in the background and people are enjoying all sorts of their favorite games. That's cool. I watched several videos on YouTube and it sounded, really looked like a pretty exciting event that you guys had. How long did it, like when did you guys start preparing for it? How, know, maybe tell us a little bit about that, like from an event marketing perspective. I think some of the listeners that are, that are, you know, interested in event marketing would be very interested in that kind of story. Yeah, it does take a lot of work. It takes us maybe five months to prepare for the event, start to finish. And it's a big thing for our brand being associated with the top games, always showing the games that come to the Philippines that we have really strong community members being able to fly in a lot of our top partners hold really good tournaments. So yeah, it takes us almost half the year for our team that prepares it. That's cool. And you guys had several sponsors, I saw. How did you maybe have those conversations with the sponsors? How did you choose those sponsors? A lot of the sponsors we already work with, so for example, companies like Hyperplay are coming back for the next year. A lot of the games like Parallel, which we held a big eSports tournament with, we've already been working with them in some way or the other, whether it's questing or tournaments, or maybe they attended the roadshow that we did in different cities in the Philippines earlier. They know that what YGG brings to the table is that we bring the community of people who actually love the games, know, to these titles, play the hell out of them. And these are people that really love to play as opposed to people who are just doing it for the yield. Of course, everyone wants to make money in this business and our gamers are part of that. yeah, what we bring to the table is that we really bring a strong community that actually loves playing games. That's really cool. Part of what I want to talk about is, as I have watched you guys over the last few years, you and I had dinner in Salt Lake City many years ago. And three years ago, it's been a while, and during the bear, you guys just are relentless and just kept building. What was it like to build in the bear market? And some of the things you guys wanted to achieve and have you reach those goals? In some ways, it's easy for us because we always have our north star of what we want to build. that actually... hasn't changed. If you go to the early podcasts from maybe 2021, the North Star is still the same. Of course, how you get there changes. We work with a lot of different game partners now. Now we have a questing system. In November, we announced the beta launch of On-Chain Guild. So the products have changed along the way, but we've always known what we wanted to build in terms of what our mission is. And so that's kind of guided us through the market. That's cool. The Yield Guild as a platform, I know there's been kind of a, I don't know how recent it is, but I've noticed in some of the podcasts that I've heard and in some of the messaging that I've seen, you're describing Yield Guild as a guild protocol, as a platform for, I think for other guilds. Maybe, could you tell us a little bit about that? Yes, so maybe one of the biggest misconceptions about YGG for those who weren't kind of deep into the weeds of Web3 gaming was that we were operating as a guild ourselves. And that was actually never true. We always operated as a platform for guilds to congregate. And this is very important in games because most people like to play with other people. and having guilds from either early in the start of Axie Infinity to the dozens or hundreds of games that playing now. There's always been room for people to specialize with different kinds of skills. You could be a competitive player, you could be a grinder, you could be a trader. It could be a whale. And guilds are kind of natural grouping of people that want to experience these games together. And now we're giving them their own on-chain identity and like on-chain groups so that basically they can have their own on-chain identity, they can have their own wallet, and then they can go to different games as the same guild, which had always happened kind of organically, maybe people in the same discord, but people haven't really have their own on-chain identity to express their guilt. cool. And how have things changed since during the bear and you guys continue to build features for the platform? How has that affected growth? Yeah, so in the bear market, we worked on our questing platform. I think a lot of questing platforms actually got built in the bear market, just knowing that one of the most important parts of crypto is that people want to discover new things and get rewarded for it. And we did that focusing on in-game questing as well. But we knew that questing, while it was an important piece of the puzzle, it kind of wasn't the end all of what we wanted to build. At the end of the day, we wanted to aggregate communities, give them a way to grow and scale together. their own assets together. So that's why in 2024 we started work on on chain guilds and we'll be doing a lot more work to kind of scale out the features of on chain guilds this year. So you've got the questing piece, which is a big piece that you guys built during the bear. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Like if I were part of a, you know, pretend like you were trying to sell me into joining and questing is one of the features that I might be interested in. Yeah, so questing is a way for you to do quests or tasks in different games and get rewarded for doing so. So when you do quests and our quests run in different seasons, we select different game partners each season where you can play different games or you can do tasks around the community to help join the communities or maybe strengthen your own guilds then you get rewarded for them in tokens. got it. And are these is joining the is joining the platform open to any game or any player or how does that work? so it's open to anyone. Our quests have been mostly for individual gamers, although lately we've been stepping up the guild or the group quests. So quests that are specific to guilds to play against each other or play as a group together. And so I think we really want to focus on that group behavior, which is how we're differentiating ourselves from other platforms that have built questing. got it. And so as a game publisher and one of my goals is to get new players to my game, how would I work with Yield Guild? Yeah, so we worked with probably a few dozen dozens of games already in the past couple of years where they work with us so that we can Dizon quests with them and then they bring their own rewards so that if there are certain parts of the game they want to feature with our community, then we co-design those quests and then when the player goes through our questing, they earn rewards from the game and then they earn rewards from YGG as well. got it. kind of view, I know this is just one of the things, but it's really a huge selling point is how large your community is and how many players you can activate so that these players can become players of these new games or these games that want to partner with Yield Guild or with YGG. And so as a publisher of a game, and my goal is to activate, let's say a thousand new players, you know, I'm just using round numbers and And probably thousands sounds like a lot in Web 3, in Web 2, you know, they're talking tens of millions, but in Web 3, you know, a thousand new players could be a good thing, right? What would that engagement look like if I wanted to work with YGG? And in my North Star is we want a thousand brand new players and then hopefully retain them so that they continue playing my game. What does that engagement look like? Is that something that you guys would do? Yeah, so we've done a lot of that with different games in the last couple of years. Games work with us so that they can Dizon quests that are either meant to discover the game or go deep into games and then discover new features there. So yeah, that's something that we do regularly with our game partners. got it. And in a podcast I listened to you mentioned that YGG has a community size of about three million. Is that right? It's probably grown a bit since then, so adding the different guild partners that we have around the world in India and Latin America across Southeast Asia, that number is probably more than 10 million right now. That's amazing. mean, considering there's roughly three billion or so, some of the stats I've seen, there's been three billion or so gamers in the world. YGG comprises a meaningful percentage of that in Web3. Yeah, when we started creating our guild partners in 2021, we really thought that distribution would be one of the most important things going forward. And to have distribution around the world, you needed to work with the best partners. So we reached out to... founders from different parts of the world and figured out which ones wanted to work with us in creating the regional guild platform. So that's why we have Ouijiji for Southeast Asia outside of the Philippines. We have K-Gen who's handling India and they've ventured to Brazil and the Middle East and all Ouijijis also in all of Latin America, including Brazil. And we have other partners that we're working with in different parts of the world. That's really amazing. And that's a huge selling point for game publishers that want to penetrate some of these regions. You'd be able to help them with that. Yeah, absolutely. That's great. I can already think of multiple game publishers that I could refer to you, which we need to talk about after the call. One that has a really interesting soccer or football game that, and I think they would be very interested in getting some activations in Latin America. Yeah, we can definitely do that. you? No, that's really great. Tell us about how you view growth for YGG. You know, as a platform, you you've mentioned a couple of things. You want to grow the, your community size. What about, what other areas of growth do you think about when you look at YGG from, you know, 10,000 feet? Like, what, I guess, what is your North Star in terms of growth? and the types of things that maybe you guys do as a team to get there. When we think about growing YGG as kind of a guild platform or a guild of guilds, we want to see how many people we can bring in from outside of Web3 into Web3. There's already, I think we don't have a lot of players inside of Web3 or users in general. A lot of the early adopters are already there. And so a lot of our focus now, once we build the initial platform, is in being able to create a compelling proposition for people who are outside of Web3 and telling them why should I join a guild, why should I play these games, what's in it for me, what do I get out of it. And so that's where a big focus of ours this year is really tapping into Web2 or people who have never joined a guild or people who never heard of Web3 before and then kind of bring them into these communities. You mentioned that in web three, there's already early adoption and now you're looking at messaging and positioning for web two players to become part of the YGG community. What's your thinking there? And I'm really interested in this because I went to GDC, I went there multiple years and two years in a row, I held a dinner with just random number set of developers and many of whom had really bad feelings towards NFTs and blockchain in general the first year. The second year, I noticed that they had kind of, they had felt less bad about blockchain, but they, many of them still didn't like NFTs. And I still have a hard time kind of understanding where they're coming from. What's your sense of that kind of feeling? Well, coming from the game industry myself, so I've been in games for over 20 years, I'd say that there are big shifts in the game industry every decade or so. And at first, there's a lot of resistance to new things. You can even see that with free-to-play games, even mobile games coming from maybe 15 years ago. And then once it starts getting proven in the market, there are a few companies that take the risks. A lot of the early adopters fail. And then there are few companies that kind of prove the path and become successful. That's when a lot of other players jump in. They want other people to kind of prove the model before they come in themselves and kind of risk their business, right? So I think it's that way with the game industry. Games are very hard to make, even in kind of established genres or established platforms like console or PC. Creating a good game is pretty hard, and then adding new technology or a new platform to it makes it even harder. So yeah, it's hard to predict which games can be successful in like all the new platforms. So I think a lot of game developers would prefer that someone shows them a playbook of how it's done before they come in. Yeah. One thing I did notice is the AAA publishers were a little open to it, but they wanted to isolate it into a really small research R &D department. And then I noticed that independent publishers were more open to it and were interested in how it might be better than getting getting into some kind of AAA studio. And so I sensed that that was kind of where the opportunity was. We're kind of independent publishers and also maybe in the single AA, maybe double AA, but I'm not in the gaming industry. And so that was just kind of from an audience and kind of appetite perspective, that's kind of what I noticed when I went to GDC. Are you saying something similar? Yeah, I tend to agree with that. Even within the AAA publishers, there are people who are curious about new technology, new platforms, but they're the ones that have the most to lose. They have established temple brands. marketing budgets into hundreds of millions of dollars and they can't afford to alienate audiences with new stuff that they might not like so they tend to be the most risk-averse while the kind of middle tier ones or the ones that are still starting out have less to lose so they're the ones that are more I would say open to the new technology or new types of platforms. Yeah, and that makes sense. The whole risk averse thing, they have so much to lose, AAA publishers, and so that makes a lot of sense. I'm gonna spend some time talking about community. I view you as one of the best community builders and... Maybe I can share a really quick story. There's a guy in my neighborhood who has a, he's a woodworker and he makes these, I don't know if you could see this, but it's an amazing, beautiful pen. And he has all these devices in his garage and it's a lathe that kind of goes in circles. And anyway, he spends a lot of time, hours making a pen. And someone that takes their craft, as seriously as that. see you as that kind of person in the community building space. And I think in the marketing world, a lot of marketers can really look at game developers and kind of game guild kind of growers and learn a lot from you. And so I would love to hear from you on kind of your view on growing a community. And you said, and I think in Jason Choi's podcast, that you learned something really early that, let me just read it. A core insight you had was that building community can't be scaled. It has to be built from the bottoms up. I would love to hear from you on maybe what you mean by that. And how can that be done? Like practically, if someone were to listen to this podcast and say, okay, I want to do exactly what Gabby did. How did, how the heck did he do this? How did you build a community of three million plus members? Or no, 10 now, it's 10 million plus. Yeah, so if you look at how internet marketing has been done in the last decade or so, especially with really large platforms like Facebook or Google, a lot of the marketing has been top-down marketing. Facebook has provided you the tools so that you could isolate the cohorts you wanted to spend money on, and then you bombard them with ads, and then kind of you acquire users that way, right? And that works at scale. Community building is a lot different in that it starts with a few people gathering. together with a common purpose. It might be for playing a game. It might be because we invested in this meme coin and we want it to go well. And a lot of community marketing in Web3 is actually very bottoms up. But bottoms up marketing is a lot harder to scale because people come in and they may have different reasons for being there. They may have different expectations. So we see that when you start building communities and when you start growing them, No one wants to be like, I'm just one of a million, three million, 10 million community members. I want to feel like I'm part of my own small group of maybe 10, 50, even 100 people, but that's already big. And that's how you scale community is by like having communities with sub-communities, sub-communities. where you may still feel like, I'm part of the whole YGG community, but my day-to-day interactions are with my eSports guild of maybe 10 to 20 people. right. So that's why when we've been building... our communities. We do a bottom sub community, but people also feel like they're part of their own sub communities. I may be part of Ola in Lataam, but from there I'm part of a smaller esports guild which kind of goes all the way up to, I'm part of the YGG community and then I'm part of several game communities. So that's how I think community marketing scales is by still having like different interest-based subgroups where people like they're part of that can roll up to kind of a bigger mission. So in the YGG space, I could be one of 10 million community members, but I'm really part of much smaller community of, let's say, of 20 in my specific e-sports guild that plays a specific game. And so it's like a niche within a niche, a group within a group. Did you go out to build it like that initially, or did you come to think like this as you started building? I think this is something that we kind of realized early on when we started the community building, initially around Axie Infinity, but then towards the other games. The communities tend to splinter as they get larger because of just different interests. so keeping the communities small, but kind of rolling up to larger communities that they can be part of. a mission that they can relate to, but having their own core identities is something that's very important for people. People want to feel that, I'm part of my own small community. have, for example, a guild called One Turn Tilt that specializes in TCGs. So they're really TCG nuts. They've played from Magic the Gathering all the way to Parallel and everything in between. And they may be part of the greater YGG community, but if you talk to them, they're part of Tilt. They're their own community and that's really how we see community building kind of scaling. Now in the YGG community, there's not just gamers, but there's also workers. Could you maybe tell us a little bit about that? I heard a little bit about that in one of the podcasts I listened to from you. kind of, it feels like an extension of the YGG platform, but now to specific workers. Is that correct? Yeah, very much so. Earlier this year, we started what we call the Future of Work Initiative. And knowing that there's a lot of ways to make money in crypto. It can be yield farming, could be gaming, could be investing, could be deep in. So whenever one says I'm full time in crypto, you may or may not have a full time job. may be, you know, you may be yield farming. There's maybe 10 different ways you're earning money. And so the Future of Work Initiative is applying our questing system. to different quests that are like non-games natively. And we focused on two things, AI and Deepin, because these are ones that kind of need human input and have a lot of this need for people to come in and do these tasks right now. So we started partnering with different AI and Deepin communities and we've added those quests to our questing platform. And yeah, the community has taken it really well. People are doing things like driving rovers, they're doing data labeling. for AI companies. They're sharing data so there's a lot of different stuff that they're doing to be earning tokens as well. That's really interesting. I did some consulting for a kind of a decentralized mechanical Turk. I don't know if you're familiar with that for, this was a while ago. And one of the tasks was labeling, labeling a corpus or a big piece of like a text file and also labeling images. How would a worker get, how did they get paid in the YGG platform if they were a labeler? it goes into our Questing system like all of the other tasks and then people can sign in, do the tasks. Yeah, once it's been verified that the task is correct and completed, then they get paid. they get paid in YGG. Yeah, it could be different depending on the task. Could be stable coins, could be YGG tokens, could be our partner tokens. I see. God, that makes a lot of sense. I think that's a huge value add to some of these partners. Do you ever see, you know, chat GPT or open AI using, you know, YGG as a labeling partner? I think eventually they could. A lot of the big AI companies probably they're not that comfortable with crypto-based task platforms yet. But we talked to a lot of the crypto and AI startups and they're very open to using these. No, it makes sense. mean, there's an enormous amount of work in the labeling space. You know, you can label anything and to be able to to train a model. mean, you just need that. getting all the help they need is, I think, would make a lot of sense. Shifting a little bit to, I asked a question earlier about growth. Have you seen any specific kind of flywheels that works? for YGG and would love to hear maybe you explain some of that. Yeah, so now we started with on-chain guilds and we've been recruiting different guilds to come in and create their own guild with us and bring their own members with us. And the way that we see it is that we're recruiting to guild leaders who then recruit their guild members to come and part of the platform. And then we can offer them quests to do as a group so that they can rally their members and do the tasks together. That makes it a lot easier than trying to acquire players one by one because when you bring in a guild leader, then they may bring in 10, 50, 100, 1,000 guild members with them. So it makes the user acquisition flywheel a little bit easier. And really interesting and cuts down on lot of work. Now where do you find the guild leaders? How does that work? A lot of them have already been part of our network in some form or the other in the last few years, but when we hold these events, either online or offline, when we hold these tournaments, we naturally see who the different groups are, and then we work with content creators and guild leaders so that we can identify who are the ones that would want to sign up, bring their guild in, and then take part of our group quests. Do you have specific marketing campaigns to attract guild leaders? For guild leaders, I think it's really around the events and tournaments because the way we think about it is that our marketing is giving them something to do where they can play a game, enjoy it with their members, and make money at the same time. So it really revolves around the events, the esports tournaments that we hold. And you had, you mentioned in 2024, or no, in 2024 you had one big event, but then it was your third event that you've had the last three years. In 2025, what are you expecting in terms of events? We actually want to scale more by being able to help communities host their own events. We don't want to hold all of the events ourselves. We probably will do some of the larger ones. But we want to be able to support a lot of community-led events and be able to support the organization, the questing, the payouts. I think that is where we'll be scaling in the future. We don't want to do all of the work of organizing those. We actually want to give communities tools to organize those themselves. And that makes a lot of sense. You you want to go where the people live. And it also cuts down on travel and there just seems to be a lot of benefits and they can grow in their specific geography. Now, going back, and this is probably more of a business development question, but as a publisher, if I had a big game or I had a game that I was really, and I need some activations and players, and I partnered with YGG, And the conversation might go something like, I want a lot of players in Latin America, specifically Brazil, maybe Ecuador, I don't know, in Latin America. What would that conversation look like if you believe that the game is good enough to partner with YGG? And I wanted to tap into the 10 million plus members, community members that YGG has. What would that conversation look like and how does one go about doing that? Well, we bring in the guild partner for that specific region and then that's where we see if there's a fit between the game and the target audience kind of trying to figure out, yeah, is this a good fit in general? What kind of quest do we create? What kind of campaign? Do we create around it? Do we have tournaments? We just do an online campaign. Is it going to be supported by an offline campaign? How will we gain players for the campaign itself? So yeah, typically we do all of those things. Okay, and is that a typical conversation that you'd have with potential players? These would be potential partners every week. And I imagine your queue is probably pretty long. Like I imagine a lot of inbound requests, right? A lot of inbound, that's right. That's good news that so many publishers want to partner with YGG. Yeah, it keeps us busy. That's really great. And is that one of the sources of revenue for YGG is partnering with these publishers? Okay. All right. I'm starting to get a sense of the economy that YGG has and what is the role of the YGG token in that economy? So the YGG token, it's used by our players to get access to different quests and to be able to earn more within that as well. So for example, you can buy a battle pass with a YGG token. It costs 25 YGG tokens, which is something like $12 right now. And with that, you're able to access premium passes that have basically quests that enable you to earn more or get more out of your own experience. Sometimes there's like exclusive skins that you can get out of it. So you have to burn YGG tokens by doing that. And then if you stake your YGG tokens, you're able to get a multiplier on the rewards that you get in your quests. So the best way to get the most out of the experience is to buy the battle pass. and then stake YGG tokens so that you can get more out of the effort that you're doing questing and playing the games. So keeps people active and you retain them as community members because they want to earn more of the YGD token. Yeah, that's right. And so now as we scale the player base, we have more people burning YGG tokens and we have more people scaling them. So we're able to have a positive tokenomics flywheel as we gain more users. Is going back to your goal for 2025 and messaging and positioning for web 2 gamers, do you have a sense of what that positioning looks like or sounds like? Is that a narrative you're working on right now? We're working on it actively. We're going to start with a big campaign in the Philippines. We premiered a documentary called the Metaverse Filipino Worker. And this is follow up to the original documentary that we made called Plato Earned that we released three years ago. And that kind of put YGG on the map along with Axie, along with the Plato Earned narrative. And so the Metaverse Filipino Worker is a story around five different people in the Philippines, very normal people who found their own niche in Web3 as community managers, as an e-sports player, as a content creator, and how they're able to take control of their lives, earn money, and be with their families without having to leave the Philippines. When does that movie come out? It comes out very soon. I'm excited to see it. Where can one see it? We're gonna launch it on YouTube, I'm pretty sure you'll hear about it. Okay, and you're working on all the promotion for it now? Yeah, that's right. So we'll be doing big promotion and starting with the Philippines, we want to partner with big Web2 brands. We're not talking at first about like crypto or Web3 or Play2Earn. We're framing it as the MFW or the Metaverse Filipino Worker is the new OFW. So the OFW or Overseas Filipino Worker. you common in the Philippines and more than 10 % of the Filipino population is outside of the Philippines doing a lot of work overseas and yeah, bringing home a lot of money to the Philippine economy by remittances. So we want to position it that way so that it's very relatable to Filipinos and saying, maybe I can earn money similar to what the OFWs are making, bringing money back to the Philippines, but I actually don't have to leave my home. All I need is a computer or a phone, internet, access in the crypto wallet and I can start earning in my own hometown. really, really cool. I want to kind of double click into a couple of things you said there. Overseas Filipino worker and then you want to, there's the metaverse Filipino worker. What was the thinking, so a couple of questions, what was the thinking behind that? Because that is very relatable. Most people are familiar with overseas Filipino workers and then the metaverse Filipino worker, that's very reliable, can make that equation really quickly. And also in crypto, not many projects have created, I can't really think of any other project that's created a documentary other than YGG. And using the entire, kind of the idea of a documentary and then using that to, you know, not just for brand awareness, but also to promote this kind of this category that you guys are building, can you tell us about the kind of the process that you and the team went through to think about this documentary, how to actually create it, and then also the promotion of Well, it started with the first documentary that we made, Play to Earn, that we did with our partners at Empharsis. It featured Axie and our committee members three years ago. We released that and it did so well that we knew that we had to have kind of like follow-up storytelling one day. And so when we started creating Metaverse Filipino Worker, we were thinking about how can we create storytelling that would relate to the average person looking into what we're doing. So we didn't want to fill it with jargon. We wanted to go into why people would go and do this in the first place. And of course in the Philippines, a lot of people leave the country to search for better earning opportunities abroad. Even if one person isn't an OFW, there's probably direct family members who are. So everybody is affected by it. Some people are probably either sending money home to the Philippines or receiving money from family members in the Philippines abroad. So it's something that everyone can relate to. And so that's why we created the MFW or the concept of the Metaverse Filipino Worker and highlighting people who have been successful being part of our communities earning money with their own skills in the Metaverse. That's really, really cool. And I love your focus on storytelling because that's such a done, that's such a poorly acquired skill in the Web3 space. When you go to your typical crypto project website, it doesn't tell a story. You actually don't even know what they do. And so what led you to arrive at that, that you need to tell a story here about the people that are affected in this new category of metaverse? Filipino worker and how do you and the team kind of come up with this, the narrative? I think it's one of our strengths that we've had since we started YDG, essentially. Like, just going into not just features, but going into why people would want to do things. So tapping into that psychology, going into why and giving people concrete examples of why this technology benefits people. especially as a way to explain to people who aren't familiar with the technology, it's always something that's been top of mind for us. You know, and it's so crazy, you know, coming from the Web2 space and having done marketing in the Web2 space, you always focus on, you know, benefits first, how it affects people, the outcomes. And then you talk about the features, which led to these, benefits, right? But in crypto, it's like you talk about features and then you talk about the technical stuff and you get bogged down and lost in all the technical jargon. then, but then if you're asked like, how does this benefit me? It's like so hard to describe. But that's really where the story is. It's like the story is in how it affects real people. And that is such a hard thing to do. And that you guys as a team, like you've realized really early on that storytelling is gonna be like a strength of yours. And it's showing, you you showed it in the first documentary, now you're building a second one. I can't wait to see it. So, about going back to marketing, have you and the team, have you done any marketing campaigns that you were super excited about but did not work? Did not work. I'm sure we have. Nothing is top of mind right now. But I think generally in the bear market, it was a lot harder to get people's attention because people were kind of fleeing away from crypto. And so I think in general during the bear market, it was a lot harder to do marketing. Yeah, I mean, I think it was for everybody. I mean, I think everyone just wanted to crawl under a rock and wait a few years. But you guys kept building. In the last three and a half, four or so years that you've been building YGG, can you think of any like memorable experiences that really affected kind of how you viewed crypto or the world? My memorable experiences have always been when people have gone up to me during our events and said, like, you know, being part of why do you change their lives in one way or another. Hearing that never gets old. That's awesome. And I'm hoping that will come out in the documentary, certainly did in the first one. I mean, so many people's lives were changed during COVID by participating in Axie and being part of the Ronan community. So the Axie community, that's really exciting. And I'm hoping that a lot of that will come out in the second documentary you guys are building too. Besides, I imagine... The messaging and positioning and adopting or acquiring more web to kind of community members and players to the YGG platform is a key goal for 2025. What others could you share with us and how could others maybe get involved in helping you kind of those goals? Yeah, so for us, we want to give groups an identity, an on-chain identity, and a way for people to hold a wallet together, to do activities together, and then have that recorded on-chain. And so it starts with games, of course. We're known as being a platform catering to gaming guilds. But it actually works with any group that would want to... like congregate together on chain. So we want to explore that in the near future and see what type of different groups we can cater to that aren't necessarily gaming guilds. I didn't ask you this earlier, but when you say on chain, YGG is, you guys are game agnostic or chain agnostic, but YGG is built on which platform specifically. Well, we're a multi-chain. So we work with Polygon, Ronin. We've recently deployed on base. And we see ourselves as agnostic because we want to go where the best content is for people to experience. And we want to be able to go there. Of course, it's not easy for us to just be on every chain. But yeah, there are others that we're exploring. So we're doing a big questing partnership with Immutable X for this year also. and we expect us to really go where the best games are. Now your PFP is a penguin, so I imagine you'll you'll you're probably looking at abstract as a chain to support in the future. Yeah, abstract is a very interesting consumer focused chain. So we're definitely looking at that as well. Yeah, I think that's going to be one of the very interesting things coming out in 2025. A consumer focused chain. There aren't... to our hearts. We're very interested in the consumer use cases. Absolutely, and there definitely isn't a lot of those. A lot of the L2s still feel very infrastructure focused, but very few that are actual retail kind of consumer facing. If you were to change one thing in kind of the Web3 gaming space, can you think of maybe what you would change if you could? I don't know about changing things. think people in Web3 gaming are still trying to figure out the... the way that they can kind of explain the benefits of Web3 games to the rest of the gaming world, especially in places like North America, where I think there's a lot more resistance to new technologies and new platforms. So Web3 gaming hasn't caught up as much as the developing world, including the Philippines. So I think, yeah, we just want to really find ways to get people to be more receptive, more open, less resistant to what Web3 gaming has to offer. In North America, what could change that people could become more receptive? I think it's a game that people would really want to play. think in the US in particular, people aren't as, I would say, focused on what I could earn from playing a game. They want to be able to really enjoy playing the game first and then maybe see what benefits that could come afterwards. Even for top games like Call of Duty or League of Legends, you're not playing League of Legends because of the skins, although the skins are how you make money, right? Or how the game itself makes money. So I think for the US, the game has to with a game that everyone would love to play and then the business model asset ownership would kind of support that afterwards. You bring up something really interesting, the geographic differences. So North America or the US versus let's say Japan or Southeast Asia or Korea. What are some of the kind of gaming, if you were to put gamers as a persona, like a gamer in Korea versus a gamer in Japan, what would the differences be between those, between the gamers in these different geographies? Yeah, so for example in East Asia or China in particular, what is seen as pay to win in the West or the US is something that's very acceptable, like paying for gear that has better stats for example is a lot more acceptable in East Asia than it is in the US. Whereas in America you don't want a gear to have any kind of structural advantage or statistical advantage in game. It may have for rarity purposes. emerging markets like Southeast Asia, they're more of course open to like in-game earnings potential. If you look at the US, they seem to think they don't like to earn, but it actually exists in the form of e-sports as well, like skilled competitive gaming. But even e-sports as an industry, took maybe almost 20 years to gain widespread acceptance in the US. So I think the US is the largest consumer market in the world, but in a sense, it's also more conservative. I think a lot of the concepts get proven elsewhere before it gets accepted in America. Yeah, and there's elements. can see some of this is changing a little bit. You know, one example is, you know, in Clash of Clans, you know, buying extra gems so that you can finish, you know, building your tower instead of waiting, you know, seven days, you get it done faster. so much resistance to that at the start. People are like, free to play games aren't real games. And now they're just normal. Yeah, but it took a while as you mentioned. No, that's very, very interesting. So knowing the geographic differences between gamer personas between the different regions, does that change a little bit how you approach recruiting community members or game partners? Yeah, definitely depends on the type of game as well. I think a game that is targeting more of a AAA audience might want to start in the US, but if you want to lot more players or gain that player liquidity, you might want to start in more emerging markets such as Southeast Asia or Latam first. There are markets where you'll get a lot more players. If you, for example, have a mobile or handheld device, definitely it's true for Asia, Latin America. And if you want to target the hardcore PC gamers. I think the US is a good place for that. Although having said that, we also have a significant amount of Steam gamers as well in emerging markets. think what used to be niche games, like for example, a Steam RPG game that used to be played by maybe only hundreds of thousands of people are now played by tens of millions of people. So actually a lot of what used to be niche behavior is now getting more mainstream. I see. Well, Gabby, this has been amazing. Any final words that you'd like to share with the audience before we go? 2025 is... be shaping up to be a very special year. Of course, know that the market works, has worked within four year cycles. It seems like crypto is getting a tailwind with Trump winning the US election. And now we've seen games that have been development of three, four years finally coming live. So I think 2025 really has the potential to be a really special one for Web3 gaming. And we want to make sure that we do our part, bring the community in organizing them on chain, be able to do things together. And we're looking forward to doing that with all of you. Amazing. Thank you, Gabby Dizon from YGG. Thank you. All right, how was our convo? was amazing. Hey, so I mentioned in there.