In yet another layoff in the digital asset space, leading crypto gaming company Yield Guild Games (YGG) said on Monday that it would lay off 35 staff as it has shut down its crypto game publisher YGG Play.
According to the official announcement, the firm will also close YGG Play’s website, its web app as well as its community-focused rewards site. With this move, YGG plans to divert its attention towards the AI data economy” to provide information that can be used to train AI models.
The firm said the decision to scale down was triggered by how YGG Play “cannot be commercially sustainable.”
“Sunsetting YGG Play is a heavy decision, but it is a market decision, not a product decision,” Yield Guild Games co-founder Gabby Dizon said. “I am proud of what this team achieved under such tough conditions.”
Further, on the rationale behind the move YGG stated that a major market crash on October 10 “fundamentally altered retail market psychology, and we do not expect the crypto consumer market or the Web3 games publishing market to recover sufficiently in the near term.”
The layoffs comes against the backdrop of several web3 companies having to bid farewell to their employees owing to bad market conditions. As per reportsl around 5,000 jobs have been cut by crypto firms this year.
To allay concerns, the firm also said that it had $20.6 million in its treasury as of the end of the first quarter.
On the future roadmap, the company stated, “Our initial focus is building out a B2B pipeline around gaming datasets, but the broader possibilities within this space are immense “
