Here is the Thai translation of the provided HTML content, following all specified rules. ``` 链游龙头YGG「断臂求生」：关停发行平台，All In AI数据经济

Original author: Mahe, Foresight News

On July 6, Yield Guild Games (YGG) official account and co-founder Gabby Dizon simultaneously released a statement announcing the decision to shut down its game publishing division, YGG Play. The team plans to gradually take the platform and some games offline before July 31, with 35 employees receiving an additional 8 weeks of salary compensation. Some games, such as GIGACHADBAT, will be handed over to developer Delabs to continue operations, while LOL Land and Waifu Sweeper will be officially retired. Games published by YGG Play have generated over $9 million in cumulative revenue, with $876,000 contributed in a single quarter in Q1 2026.

Gabby Dizon stated in the announcement: "This is a market decision, not a product decision. Although the team successfully validated the casual gaming track—short sessions, high engagement, and a fast feedback loop for crypto-native users—the liquidity shortage and declining user confidence in the current macroeconomic environment have made this business no longer commercially sustainable."

While shutting down YGG Play, YGG also announced a complete pivot to the AI data economy, aiming to capture the multi-billion dollar market for AI training datasets. The initial focus will be on building B2B pipelines centered around gaming datasets.

The Blockchain Game Publishing Platform YGG Play

YGG Play was YGG's Web3 game publishing arm launched in 2025, focusing on serving casual gamers within the crypto space. It targeted mobile gaming experiences that are short, fast-paced, with social and reward feedback elements, helping independent studios quickly deploy on-chain and acquire users through YGG's community network. These games accumulated significant revenue during 2025-2026, proving that even in the late stages of a bear market, specific vertical tracks can still generate real payments.

However, the revenue peak occurred around October 2025. The mass liquidation events in the crypto market in October further dampened the target users' willingness to pay and retention rates. The closure of YGG Play marks a strategic contraction for YGG from its dual-engine model of "guild operations + publishing."

To understand the weight of this shutdown, one must trace YGG's complete trajectory.

In 2020, Philippine gaming industry veterans Gabby Dizon, Beryl Li, and anonymous partner Owl of Moistness co-founded YGG. This was during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, when many service industry workers in the Philippines were jobless. Axie Infinity, then the hottest Play-to-Earn (P2E) game, used a "scholarship" model to allow players to borrow Axie NFTs for battles and then share the earnings.

YGG seized this opportunity, starting as a small guild. It raised funds to purchase Axie assets, organized and trained players, quickly becoming one of the largest and most influential guilds in the Axie ecosystem.

2021 was YGG's peak year. Driven by both the bull market and the P2E narrative, its token price soared, surpassing $10 at its highest. YGG expanded from a single Axie guild into a global network, covering dozens of regional guilds and collaborating with over 80 blockchain gaming and infrastructure projects. It didn't just provide asset lending; it helped players maximize earnings through quests, events, and community operations. In places like the Philippines, a real economic phenomenon of "gaming as work" emerged, and YGG was seen as the benchmark for the P2E model.

At its peak, YGG's model was widely replicated: guilds became essential intermediaries connecting players, assets, and games. DAO governance and token incentives allowed participants to share in the growth dividends. YGG itself evolved from a mere "asset manager" into an investment, content, and community platform.

With the arrival of the 2022 crypto bear market, the fragility of Axie Infinity's economic model was exposed—slowing new user inflow, collapsing token prices, and significant player churn. Guilds and P2E projects disappeared en masse, and the industry entered a trough. YGG survived but began a long period of adaptation. In 2025, YGG placed another bet on a new direction: launching YGG Play to formally enter the game publishing space, as heavy P2E was no longer viable, and crypto users naturally preferred high-frequency, instant-gratification casual experiences.

This cessation of operations comes just about a year after that previous pivot.

A Microcosm of the Blockchain Gaming Industry

The closure of YGG Play epitomizes the development trajectory of blockchain gaming over the past five years.

Crypto quantitative trading and market-making firm Caladan reviewed the five-year journey of the Web3 gaming sector from feverish boom to total collapse back in April this year. Its core conclusion was that the decline of Web3 games wasn't a normal cyclical trough, but stemmed from a fundamental "structural mismatch" between their underlying speculative financial design and players' genuine demand for entertainment, leading to a devastating capital destruction of $15 billion.

Examples abound: Pixelmon raised $70 million but didn't even release an open beta in 4 years; Ember Sword burned through $18 million before liquidating; and Hamster Kombat lost 96% of its users within 6 months.

As of April 2026, out of approximately 3,200 blockchain game projects tracked in reports, 93% were classified as "effectively dead" or completely inactive. The average price of gaming-related crypto tokens was down 95% from their all-time highs in 2022.

The boom of blockchain gaming was built entirely on the Ponzi-like dividend logic of "play-to-earn." This model is inherently an unsustainable speculative financial loop: the earnings of early players and token prices depend entirely on a constant influx of new players buying tokens or NFTs. Once user growth slows or external capital inflow decreases, severe token inflation quickly breaks the economic balance, triggering a "death spiral" of token price collapse, shrinking earnings, and mass user exodus.

YGG Play was not a failure in product delivery or revenue numbers, but it failed on "market timing."

The story of blockchain gaming may be nearing its end.