Gaming guilds amassed huge treasuries during last cycle’s Axie Infinity-inspired blockchain gaming bull run. But how did they survive the grinding bear market and pivot their treasuries to set themselves up for the bull market?
And more importantly, which one is in pole position to take advantage of the big opportunties expected this year?
Gaming guilds — organized groups of sponsored gamers — were the hot Web3 business model of 2021. They emerged because popular blockchain games, most notably Axie Infinity, required expensive NFTs to play, and “scholarships” enabled gamers to access resources to learn and to play through the gaming guild.
Valued as cash cows in 2021, gaming guilds were a customer acquisition masterstroke, on-boarding players from developing countries reeling from unemployment due to Covid lockdowns.
The guilds became very lucrative. Including micro guilds they were believed to number over 20,000. There were 800 guilds in the Phillipnes alone. The Merit Circle guild raised $100 million and Avocado guild raised $45 million in 2021. Merit Circle raised over $100 million in November 2021 and YGG was valued over $10 billion dollars for a concept that suggested the revenue would keep coming in indefinitely.
Then Axie Infinity, the game most of the guilds had built their economies upon, collapsed.
Mitch Penman-Allen, the co-founder of the Perion gaming guild told Magazine:
“By the end of 2022, we were certain that the Axie Ecosystem would not be sustainable. We had scaled down our exposure to Axie and had diversified our business model. We had also started to strategize and plan a roadmap for the future, however the collapse came faster than we thought – accelerated by a $620 million hack of the Axie Ecosystem.”
And so the guilds were left with huge treasuries and a need to pivot. But to what?
As the bear market ravaged user bases, revenue and interest, some guilds pivoted to making and investing in new games in search of a new hit. Others,…
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