By the time the YGG Play Launchpad finally flipped the switch in mid October, a lot of people in crypto gaming secretly wondered the same thing: was this going to be yet another token sale dressed up as a “platform,” or could Yield Guild Games actually turn its LOL Land phenomenon into something bigger and more durable?
The early numbers from October and November suggest this is more than just a new venue for speculation. The launchpad opened around October 15 with LOL Land’s in game currency, the $LOL token, as its debut offering, combining a points based quest system, YGG staking and a tightly scripted token sale that ran from October 29 to 31 before trading began on November 1 exclusively on decentralized exchanges. In the weeks that followed, more than 1 million dollars worth of YGG was staked through the platform as players chased allocations, leaderboard spots and the promise of ongoing rewards.
For a project that brands itself around “casual degen” energy, the setup is surprisingly structured. YGG Play sits on top of Yield Guild Games’ existing ecosystem and tries to solve a very specific problem that has haunted Web3 gaming for years: people show up for the token, not the game. Here, the whole flow is reversed. You discover the game first, through YGG Play’s hub, you start doing quests or staking YGG, you accumulate YGG Play Points, and only then does that engagement translate into access to token launches like $LOL.
LOL Land itself is the proof that this loop can work. Launched in May 2025 on the Abstract chain, the browser based board game looks simple at a glance, something like a crypto flavored spin on Monopoly that you can open in a tab during lunch break. Under the hood, though, it has quietly become one of the more surprising revenue stories in Web3 gaming. By early October, the game had already generated around 4.5 million dollars in lifetime revenue, with 2.4 million of that arriving in just the previous 30 days. Later reporting would point to weekly revenue topping 1 million dollars and total revenue moving beyond 6.5 million, driven not by pure token farming but by players who actually keep coming back to roll dice, unlock maps like YGG City and Ice World, and climb a 10 tier VIP system.
Those revenue streams are not just numbers on a dashboard. Yield Guild has been using LOL Land cash flow to actively buy back its own YGG token, including a 1 million dollar repurchase in late August that removed a noticeable chunk of supply from the market. When you zoom out, the launchpad is essentially the next layer of that same flywheel. The game earns money from players, some of that revenue strengthens the guild’s token economics, and then the guild funnels liquidity, users and marketing into new launches like $LOL.
The $LOL token itself is deliberately modest in scale compared with many high flying gaming ICOs from the last cycle. It comes with a 5 billion total supply and an initial fully diluted valuation of around 900,000 dollars. Only 10 percent of the supply was set aside for the launchpad sale, another 10 percent for a Play to Airdrop program, and 10 percent for the development team. YGG Play as a platform does not take a token allocation, a choice the team has highlighted as a way to avoid obvious conflicts of interest.
On paper, $LOL is firmly in the “utility token” bucket. Inside LOL Land, it powers the VIP system that sits at the heart of the game’s economy. Players stake $LOL to climb VIP levels, which unlock higher withdrawal limits, boosted rewards and various in game perks. There are ten levels in total, each requiring a larger stake, so the token functions as a kind of gate and throttle for the most engaged users rather than a simple mine and dump reward. Outside the game, launchpad participants know from day one that trading will only happen on decentralized exchanges through the LOL liquidity pool, seeded with 180,000 dollars and designed to recycle a portion of swap fees back into player rewards once the pool hits a one million dollar cap.
The way you got your hands on $LOL during the October sale was very much in line with this “earn your seat” philosophy. Instead of a pure lottery or first come first served system, players accumulated YGG Play Points in advance by staking YGG or completing quests. When the contribution window opened, they used a mix of points and YGG to join the sale in a single transaction. Points determined the relative share of the allocation, while the amount of YGG set the final contribution size, with individual caps set to prevent a few wallets from hoovering up the sale. Any unused YGG was automatically refunded and points spent to enter the sale were burned.
Behind the scenes, that October soft launch turned into a pretty interesting data point for the guild. According to recent stats shared through the community and reposted on Binance’s social platform, more than 1 million dollars worth of YGG ended up staked on the platform between mid October and the end of November, while daily active users on YGG Play jumped roughly 40 percent in that same period. You can argue over how “sticky” those users will be, but it does show that a significant chunk of the guild’s audience was willing to lock tokens and grind quests, not just click through a form.
Of course, all of this is happening in a broader context where YGG has been busy repositioning itself. Once known mainly as a guild that rented out NFTs for play to earn titles, the organization has morphed into a kind of publisher and infrastructure player. YGG Play, the publishing arm behind LOL Land and the launchpad, was set up to give developers a more transparent, smart contract based revenue share and a ready made audience of hundreds of thousands of Web3 native players. The launchpad is a natural extension of that model, letting YGG route those same users into token launches that are tied to actual playable games.
The initial lineup on the platform reinforces that message. Alongside LOL Land, the YGG Play Launchpad showcases a handful of other Web3 titles, from GigaChad style baseball games to arena brawlers and Pirate Nation, a strategy title from Proof of Play that joined the YGG Play publishing network as the launchpad was going live. The idea is that casual players can bounce between games, stack points and, over time, earn access to multiple token events without needing to chase every new Discord server or manual allow list.
There are still open questions. Limiting $LOL to DEX trading removes some of the hype and marketing punch that comes with big centralized exchange listings, even if it fits the community first narrative. The launch target of 90,000 dollars for the initial sale and a sub 1 million dollar initial market cap are intentionally conservative compared with the oversized valuations of the last cycle, but they also mean that success depends heavily on whether LOL Land can keep drawing in new and returning players month after month.
Then there is the broader macro backdrop. Web3 gaming is still fighting skepticism, both from traditional gamers who dislike tokens in their games and from crypto traders who were burned by unsustainable play to earn models. YGG’s bet is that real revenue, clear token utility and a launchpad that rewards actual participation rather than pure capital will eventually win people over. The more than 1 million dollars staked on YGG Play in its first weeks and the steady revenue machine that LOL Land has become make that argument look credible, at least for now.
If you squint a little, the October and November launch window feels like a controlled experiment. Can a guild driven ecosystem, a modest utility token and a browser board game really carry the weight of a new kind of gaming launchpad. Or, a few quarters from now, will $LOL and its launchpad debut be remembered as a clever one off in a market that still prefers big promises over slow, compounding engagement.
@Yield Guild Games #YGGPlay $YGG
