YGG’s New Advisor Drops Truth Bomb: On-Chain Games Lack a ’Secret Sauce’
GameFi's hype train just hit a speed bump. Yield Guild Games' latest advisor shattered illusions with a blunt assessment: blockchain gaming's 'secret sauce' doesn't exist.
No magic formula—just hard work.
The verdict lands as play-to-earn struggles to justify its valuation. Meanwhile, traditional gaming studios quietly stack profits—without tokenomics white papers.
‘Casual Degens’
Campbell’s thinking is helping inform how YGG approaches third-party publishing. Rather than betting on individual games, their team is building a system to test, learn, and scale, in a way that could begin with what it believes to be the right kind of audience.
“There are a lot of people in crypto,” Gabby Dizon, co-founder of Yield Guild Games, said in a statement—but while not all would “call themselves gamers,” many are open to playing if the experience is "fun, casual," and if it proves “rewarding at every turn.”
That audience has been overlooked by studios chasing traditional gamers or speculators. YGG calls them Casual Degens, crypto-native players drawn to short, rewarding game loops that fit their existing habits.
Campbell believes the model offers a clearer path to economic sustainability than past approaches. “What we have with YGG is this model that works in terms of a monetization model,” he said.
The goal now is to test mechanics, themes, and formats that fit that model and find patterns that can scale, not just prototypes that survive.
