Yield Guild Games co-founder Gabby Dizon describes a challenging period for Web3 gaming defined by studio closures and shifting investment. While new regulations provide legal clarity, Dizon argues that industry success depends on creating native blockchain experiences driven by genuine user interest rather than traditional venture capital cycles.
The industry is shifting toward games developed using AI tools, which significantly lowers production costs for hobbyist creators. Dizon predicts that major titles like GTA 6 will avoid crypto integrations, favoring a bottom-up approach where unique, experimental gameplay defines the next generation of successful Web3 titles.
Gabby Dizon, co-founder of Yield Guild Games (YGG) and YGG Play, sat down with Cointelegraph’s Ciaran Lyons to talk about where Web3 gaming actually stands in 2026, the rise of AI-built “vibe-coded” games, and why he’d bet against crypto showing up in GTA 6.
Web3 gaming is in its quiet period. Studios are shutting down. VC money has migrated to AI. Token charts have been a wasteland since the October 10 market wipeout. And the mainstream still hasn’t bought into the idea that “owning your items” is a feature worth paying for.
Gabby Dizon, co-founder of Yield Guild Games (YGG) and the man behind the YGG Play publishing arm, doesn’t sugarcoat any of it. In a recent interview with Cointelegraph’s Ciaran Lyons, he laid out where the industry actually stands in 2026, what’s working, what isn’t, and the one trend he thinks everyone in Web3 gaming should be paying attention to: games built almost entirely by AI.
“It’s Been a Tough Year”
Dizon opened with the obvious. The October 10, 2025 market drawdown cratered on-chain activity. Triggered by President Trump’s surprise 100% China tariff announcement, the day saw over $19 billion in leveraged positions liquidated, the largest single-day deleveraging event in crypto history. Bitcoin fell from above $125,000 to below $102,000 in hours. Wallets emptied. App usage followed the same line down.
“A lot of people aren’t trading, maybe lost a lot of money, and this is translated to app usage as well,” he said. Studio closures followed.
In 2022, Web3 gaming pulled a sizable share of all Web3 venture funding. That figure has collapsed as VCs chase AI deals instead. Dizon doesn’t blame the VCs. He blames the product.
“No game has really proven the model and made it mainstream,” he said. The traditional gaming industry is also shedding jobs and studios, so it’s not a crypto-only problem. People are spending less time playing games at all. They’re talking to ChatGPT instead.
The Clarity Act Will Help. Sort Of.
Ciaran Lyons brought up Immutable co-founder Robbie Ferguson’s bullish comments about the US CLARITY Act unlocking new capital. Ferguson has called it “the single most transformational piece of legislation for crypto” and has said he’s already in conversations with multi-billion-dollar gaming studios considering launching tokens once the bill becomes law. The CLARITY Act passed the House in July 2025 with a 294-134 bipartisan vote and cleared the Senate Banking Committee on May 14, 2026. Senate floor passage is the next hurdle.
Dizon agrees the legislation matters, but he frames it as table stakes rather than a catalyst.
“There’s been a question mark from mainstream whether it’s safe or not to touch crypto, especially with what happened with FTX,” he said. “The CLARITY Act is a really good step to say it’s safe to do this. You’re not breaking any laws. Certainly we need that boost. And then it’s up to our products to deliver.”
Translation: regulation removes an excuse. It doesn’t make a hit game.
What YGG Play Has Actually Shipped
YGG Play launched in May 2025 as a “casual degen” publishing portal. The portfolio so far:
- LOL Land, launched May 23, 2025 on Abstract Chain. A browser-based, Monopoly-style board game featuring Pudgy Penguins community characters. It reached over 25,000 players in its opening weekend, peaked at 631,000 monthly active users by July 2025, and surpassed $8.2 million in lifetime revenue by the end of 2025.
- YGG Play Launchpad, launched October 2025. A discovery hub and token launchpad for crypto-native games. The $LOL token was its first launch.
- GIGACHADBAT, a snackable baseball-themed tap-to-play title developed by Delabs Games and published through YGG Play. Built on Abstract Chain. Its $CHAD token launched on February 6, 2026.
- Waifu Sweeper, publicly launched January 30, 2026. Developed by Raitomira (whose founders include Blizzard and Tencent veterans), published by YGG Play. A skill-based puzzle game combining Minesweeper logic with gacha-style anime waifus.
Dizon describes the lineup as a deliberate spread: ultra-casual at one end, hardcore competitive at the other, with everything in between. “We’re giving people a portfolio of different types of games they can enjoy.”
What’s Working, What’s Flopping
Asked which games actually survive in Web3, Dizon’s answer was blunt: the crypto-native ones. Gigaverse, Onchain Heroes, Fishing Frenzy. Games that don’t try to hide what they are.
“A lot of the games that have tried to bridge to Web2, bridge to AAA, it’s been a really, really tough road,” he said.
The original wave of CryptoKitties and early Axie Infinity worked because crypto wasn’t bolted on. It was the gameplay. Etching DNA onto the blockchain, passing breeding traits to offspring NFTs, that was the hook. The play-to-earn era then took the same idea mainstream before economics caught up with it.
The lesson, in Dizon’s view, is that Web3 gaming has always worked best from the bottom up.
Has Web3 Gaming Matured Past the Token Cycle?
Sort of. “The correlation is definitely there,” Dizon admitted. When crypto bleeds, gaming bleeds. But he sees an important shift. The games surviving this downturn aren’t token Ponzis anymore. They’re surviving because people actually like playing them.
That’s the real maturity signal.
2027: Forget the VCs, Watch the Users
Lyons asked whether 2027 might bring a VC revival to Web3 gaming. Dizon’s response was the kind of thing you don’t expect from someone who runs a venture-funded company.
“Honestly, I don’t care as much about the VC interest as I care about the user interest. If the user interest comes, the investor interest will follow.”
He sees the past few years as a necessary contraction. The 2022 funding bonanza inflated expectations way beyond what the product side could deliver. Studios got lean. Teams got smaller. What’s left is a tighter core of builders shipping for an audience that actually exists.
The Real Story: Vibe-Coded Games
This is where Dizon got animated.
“Vibe coding” refers to building games with AI tools instead of traditional development teams. Platforms like Verse8 (a YGG Play partner), Rosebud AI, and Animoca Minds now let one person prompt-build playable game prototypes in hours. Pair that with OpenAI Codex or Claude Code and you have something approaching real software coming out of solo developers over a weekend.
YGG isn’t building its own vibe-coding platform. It’s positioning the YGG Play Launchpad as the place these games can find an audience and make money.
“There are so many ways now where you can create a game easily with AI,” Dizon said. “But it’s still hard to make money with these games. A big part of the democratization of AI tools is that people will want to make their own app and make money from it. What we want to do is use the tools we already have on the YGG Play Launchpad to help vibe-coded games monetize.”
The pipeline: prototype to product to monetization. YGG runs workshops and hackathons to walk vibe coders through it. The most recent one was BuidlHack 2026 in Seoul during Korea BUIDL Week (April 13 to 19, 2026), where 120 teams submitted playable games built on Verse8. The winning entry, “Bank or Plank,” was a pirate-themed 3D multiplayer board game built solo and online in under a month, and it’s now being onboarded to YGG Play.
A New Golden Age for Hobbyists
The AI shift has hammered the broader game industry’s job market. Dizon doesn’t dispute that. But he sees the flip side.
“It’s a new golden age for hobbyist developers. The barrier to entry for creating games is much lower. There’s going to be a lot of slop that goes along with that. But that means a lot more people can experiment with ideas cheaply.”
His sharpest line: gaming had fallen into the trap of becoming “too expensive to fail.” When the AAA bets missed, they wiped out entire studios. Vibe coding resets that math.
“I can make a game idea today and it can fail by tomorrow. The following day I can try the next one. We have to go back to making the cost of failure cheap.”
GTA 6 and Crypto: “I’d Bet on None”
Lyons brought up the speculation around GTA 6 potentially having blockchain elements. Dizon shut it down on record.
“GTA 6 is probably going to sell a billion dollars first day. It’s probably too risky for them to introduce crypto elements with something they know everyone wants to buy the day it comes out. What would they need crypto for? There would probably be backlash if they put it in.”
Analyst forecasts back the sales prediction up. Konvoy Ventures projects roughly $6.8 billion in revenue within 60 days of launch, with some analysts expecting more than 25 million copies sold in 24 hours. GTA 5 hit $1 billion in three days back in 2013. GTA 6 is currently set to release November 19, 2026 on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, after two delays.
If Dizon had to bet on Polymarket on what kind of crypto integration GTA 6 might ship with, his answer was direct: “I would bet on none.” The most he’d expect is some optional commemorative NFTs.
His reasoning makes sense once you hear it. Crypto fits trading-heavy games. Think CS:GO skins. GTA is known for being an immersive world, not a trading sim. “You don’t go to GTA because you want to trade guns or cars with somebody.”
He extended the same logic to Off the Grid, the Gunzilla Games battle royale that launched in early access on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via Epic in October 2024. The game uses the GUNZ blockchain (an Avalanche subnet) for optional NFT integration. “Now you’re contending on two fronts. You’re contending on a triple-A game front and you’re contending on the blockchain front. It’s a lot harder to be best of class at both.”
GTA 6 will also be one of the last truly large games made pre-AI. Together with Baldur’s Gate 3, which took roughly six years to develop at Larian Studios, it represents an era of handcrafted production that may not survive the AI shift. “I don’t think anyone’s crazy enough to make a game for that long without using AI in one way or another after this.”
How AAA Eventually Comes Around to Crypto
Lyons asked the obvious follow-up: how do you get traditional studios to take crypto seriously?
Dizon’s answer was that you don’t, at least not by trying to retrofit it into polished AAA experiences. You build from the bottom up.
“Let’s keep it experimental, like the original strengths of CryptoKitties and Axie Infinity. Let’s deliver new gameplay that will surprise people, have them have fun, rather than give them a polished AAA game that has crypto hidden underneath. That doesn’t really excite anyone except the people watching the trading volumes.”
The CryptoKitties breeding mechanic is his recurring example. A unique experience that only works because the blockchain is doing something the gameplay needs. That’s the model. Not crypto as a feature toggle in someone else’s game.
What’s Exciting Right Now
Beyond Waifu Sweeper, Dizon name-checked Onchain Heroes, which recently shipped Axie: Den of Mysteries, a dungeon-crawler collab with Axie Infinity that runs on Ronin. Quick three-to-five minute runs, skill-based, built for the people who already live in this corner of the internet. “These are the things I like to see.”
The Metaverse Isn’t Dead. It Was Just Early.
Lyons asked for predictions out to 2030. Dizon went straight to the M word.
“People wrote off the metaverse after the 2022 hype. People have been writing off VR for a long time. People have been writing off AI for a long time, and now it’s having its moment.”
His thesis: VR, NFTs, and AI are all converging. AI world models can now generate playable virtual worlds without a traditional game engine. Hardware is moving from headsets to glasses. The metaverse Meta tried to force on people top-down didn’t work, but the demand for immersive worlds with economic stake never went away.
The early MMOs already prefigured it. Immersion plus gameplay plus an economy where players have skin in the game. People want that. They just don’t want it dressed in a Zuckerberg avatar with no legs.
What’s Next for YGG
For the rest of 2026, Dizon’s plan is more of the same direction. More vibe-coded games on the launchpad. More hackathons. More tournaments.
“The AAA side is getting a lot more conservative because of studio shutdowns and game failures. People are actually having a lot of fun on the vibe coding side saying ‘Hey, look what I made over the last weekend.’ That kind of innovation is really what you want to lean into.”
His pitch to anyone who builds a game this weekend: put it online, tag YGG Play on X, and see what happens.
That’s the whole barrier to entry now. One developer. One weekend. One tweet.
Watch the full Cointelegraph interview with Gabby Dizon for the complete conversation.
