In Brief:
- Waifu Sweeper shut down July 31, six months after its public launch, on the final day of YGG Play (official site)’s wind-down.
- Purchases and platform missions were switched off July 9; players had until July 31 to unstake YGG and redeem in-game points.
- Yield Guild Games (official site) cut 35 jobs and is redirecting its treasury toward selling gaming datasets for AI training.
Waifu Sweeper stopped working July 31. The puzzle game, built by Raitomira and published by YGG Play on Abstract, had been open to the public for just over six months.
“Today marks our final day, and the game will no longer be accessible after today,” the game said in a post on X.
GG, Waifu Sweeper community!
Today marks our final day, and the game will no longer be accessible after today. From sweeping away the dark lord to fiercely climbing up the leaderboards, you brought unmatched energy, competition, and fun to this project. We couldn't have@WaifuSweeperView on X ↗
The closure was the last item on a schedule Yield Guild Games set in motion July 6, when it announced it would sunset YGG Play, its publishing arm, and eliminate 35 positions.
How the wind-down ran
YGG Play published a shutdown guide July 8. At 3 p.m. Singapore time the following day, purchase functions and every platform mission system for Waifu Sweeper and LOL Land were switched off.
July 31 was the final day of platform support. After it, yggplay.fun, the launchpad at app.yggplay.fun and the community missions site at community.yggplay.fun are permanently down.
Players were told to finish YGG unstaking and in-game point redemptions before the cutoff. Compliant balances left unprocessed will be converted automatically and sent to the associated wallets after a snapshot taken on the deadline. No manual support is available after that.
A market decision
“Sunsetting YGG Play is a heavy decision, but it is a market decision, not a product decision,” said Yield Guild co-founder Gabby Dizon.
The company said the publishing unit “cannot be commercially sustainable” against a prolonged crypto downturn and a video game publishing market it described as similarly brutal. It pointed to the Oct. 10 liquidation event, which it said “fundamentally altered retail market psychology.”
The numbers behind that framing are specific. YGG Play crossed roughly $9 million in lifetime revenue through the first quarter of 2026 and peaked near $3 million in a single month in October 2025. Revenue slid steadily after that peak.
Dizon declined to read the closure as a verdict on the sector, calling it “specific to our circumstances” and “not prescriptive for the industry,” and citing Axie (official site), Gigaverse (official site) and OnChain Heroes (official site).
The 35 affected employees get eight weeks of additional severance. YGG said it would help them find new roles and invited companies to contact it for hiring referrals.
What survives
Two titles keep running. GIGACHADBAT moves to Delabs Games and Ragnarok Breaker to Planetarium Labs starting Aug. 1, with live services maintained by each studio and new token redemption processes.
Waifu Sweeper and LOL Land (official site) got no such handoff.
YGG’s treasury sits above $20 million, with $6 million in stablecoins, T-bills and large-cap tokens, which the company said gives it roughly four years of runway. Its first move is a B2B pipeline selling gaming-derived datasets to train AI models, on the argument that players generate useful data by making fast, complex decisions under pressure. It has already rebranded YGG Alerts, its Philippines community initiative of roughly one million people, as AI Alerts.
Six months in market
Raitomira co-founders Hun Pascal Park and Karan Singh built the game. Park worked at Blizzard Entertainment on StarCraft II, Overwatch and Hearthstone. Singh worked on PUBG Mobile at Tencent Mobile’s publishing division.
The game pairs Minesweeper-style deduction with a gacha layer of collectible anime characters, who serve an aesthetic and social role without changing the board mechanics. Its economy ran on the character gacha, an official NFT store, spin bundles and an initial hero mint priced around 6.9 USDT.
YGG Play, Raitomira and OpenSea co-hosted a launch party at Art Basel Miami on Dec. 6, 2025, minting a soulbound NFT on Abstract as proof of attendance. Public launch followed Jan. 28. On March 2, the game added Waifu Rush, a weekly leaderboard contest.
“From sweeping away the dark lord to fiercely climbing up the leaderboards, you brought unmatched energy, competition, and fun to this project,” the game said.
