YGG’s Gabby Dizon, X Hall of Flame – Cointelegraph Magazine

With the crypto bull run heating up, crypto noobs and old-timers alike are scrambling to keep up with the constantly changing narratives every week. But Yield Guild Games co-founder and CEO Gabby Dizon isn’t buying into the whole “chasing narratives” strategy.

“I don’t believe in chasing narratives,” Dizon tells Hall of Flame at the YGG Play Summit in the Philippines.

“Of course, there are narratives where you are a follower, like those late into memes. I participate in a small way to understand how people trading memecoins are thinking, but I don’t trade in any serious way,” he says.

Dizon is sticking to building and having the “conviction” that, sooner or later, the narrative will “turn its spotlight” back onto the Web3 gaming industry. 

“When that happens, we just have to be ready,” he says. 

Yield Guild Games is a Guild Protocol formed in late 2020 with a focus on coordinating players around the world to earn rewards in play-to-earn games.

Dizon, who comes from a gaming dev background in traditional gaming, jumped into blockchain gaming after “tinkering with Ethereum and smart contracts in 2017” and discovering NFTs in 2018.

Dizon wanted to be an early innovator in Web3 gaming because he felt like he missed the boat when he jumped into Web2 mobile free-to-play games in 2014.

“I started my game company in 2014, and the market was already kind of midway. It was already starting to mature, and I felt that I was late, that I should have been earlier,” Dizon says.

What led Gabby Dizon to X fame?

Dizon has had his X account for nearly 15 years, but he admits his follower count stayed pretty modest during the first decade when he was still in the Web2 traditional gaming industry.

“From around 2008 to 2018, I amassed a total of 2,000 followers,” he says, laughing.

Dizon explains that everything changed in 2018 when he started “posting a lot about NFTs.”

“2018 and 2019 didn’t matter that much, but the market started picking up in 2020, so that’s when the follower count started going up,” he explains.

He says it was like a domino effect: His follower count skyrocketed by 40x, the kind of surge that would make any memecoin trader jealous.

“When people got interested in NFTs, people started to be interested in Web3 gaming, and I got up to 80,000 during the 2021 bull market,” he says.

Dizon modestly admits that he “was just posting something that a lot of people were interested in.”

Dizon now has 137,800 followers on X, but he says having a big following brings its fair share of unnecessary stress.

“It is pretty weird to be sort of a famous person on Twitter because I just use it like a normal person,” he says.

He jokingly admits that he’s had the thought, “Oh, what shit did I post six years ago that I might be canceled for today?”

“I don’t remember deleting anything,” he adds, laughing. “But I didn’t look through everything either. I was just thinking, did I post anything especially stupid?”

What content does Gabby Dizon create?

Dizon says he “really just posts what I think about the market.”

“We post a lot of support for the games that we work with YGG Esports. I would say that I’ve been posting less about general NFTs and more about gaming.”

Every now and then, you’ll spot Dizon dropping subtle hints that his teenage son is a bit of a crypto degen.

With the crypto industry getting bigger and bigger, Dizon says it’s getting harder for key opinion leaders to cover every part of it, so it forces them to narrow their focus a bit more.

“The space was so small in 2020, 2021, where you could see everything that was happening in crypto,” Dizon says.

“I was doing DeFi, I was doing NFTs, I was doing games. […] Now I’m a lot more specialized on games and the ecosystem around it, because everything’s just gotten much, much bigger,” he adds.

Gabby Dizon’s predictions?

Dizon thinks that with all the hype around the crypto market, the gaming use case is just as bullish for the next year.

“I think we will start to see games that consistently have over a million players per month,” Dizon predicts, admitting that he is “trying to be conservative here because that is a big jump right now.”

“Maybe the top crypto games are currently doing a few 100,000 gamers monthly,” he says.

He points out that some of the “best games in the world” are racking up “tens of millions,” if not over “100 million users,” right now.

Dizon also anticipates seeing gamers interact more “with the asset side, maybe trading more.”

Ciaran Lyons

Ciaran Lyons is an Australian crypto journalist. He’s also a standup comedian and has been a radio and TV presenter on Triple J, SBS and The Project.