Play-to-Earn gaming guilds

A guild is described as a group of people who have banded together due to shared economic interests and common goals. As with any organization, a guild is about strategically harvesting and deploying resources to achieve a common goal. For example, in video games, guilds are commonly formed through an alliance of gamers who have different in-game character archetypes to accomplish a specific objective, such as fighting mobs or completing in-game quests.

Within the cryptoverse, there are already various games built atop blockchains, which gave birth to play-to-earn gaming (P2E). P2E revolutionizes the relationship between the game and the player by allowing them to earn an income in exchange for their time playing the game.

Similarly, there are two types of guilds formed within the P2E cryptoverse; Gaming DAO and GameFi DAO. A DAO stands for "decentralized autonomous organization," a community-owned organization with no centralized ownership.

A gaming DAO is analogous to a traditional in-game guild, whose primary goal is to achieve the game's objective. It operates similarly to a government, where it inherently has a more complex set of objectives such as collecting in-game items, expanding its territories, and completing quests. Therefore, a gaming DAO extends beyond profit-maximizing and seeks to be game-first.

Whereas a GameFi DAO sits between a gaming DAO and a decentralized finance (DeFi) DAO. The first word, "GameFi," stands for "Gaming Finance," which refers to the incorporation of financial elements within a game. Although DAO participants are participating in a game, their ultimate goal is profit-maximizing. Therefore, they tend to be profit-first.

A GameFi DAO is akin to an eSports team in that it hires a pool of gamers to represent them. As a result, the earnings of the players will be split between them and the GameFi DAO. Hence, the difference between a gaming DAO and a GameFi DAO is the level of DAO members' involvement in the game. For example, Yield Guild Games is a GameFi DAO that has a set of players earn on their behalf in P2E games such as Axie Infinity. Meanwhile, a gaming DAO, like Orden or dfdao, has its own members voluntarily joining in a game called DarkForest to complete the game's objective together.

That being said, one does not necessarily need a DAO to form a guild in the P2E space. However, when a guild begins to scale, a DAO infrastructure may be a more appropriate architecture to align the incentives of all guild members. The DAO establishment is also consistent with the decentralization ethos of the crypto community.

This piece is split into three sections:

To understand P2E further, let us look at how a traditional gameplay experience looks like today.

As a casual player, you are just spending your time playing a game in return for having an enjoyable gaming experience.