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Yellow Panther: The gamer who wears many hats
Web3 gaming star Yellow Panther wants to set the record straight: full-time gaming is so much more than just playing; it is basically running a multi-operational business without the suit and tie.
Speaking to Web3 Gamer at the YGG Play Summit in the Philippines, Yellow Panther, aka “YP,” reveals that becoming one of the most popular Web3 gamers while still just 26 years old has landed him gigs “advising several big gaming companies and projects.”
“I realized that I have a lot of knowledge and a lot of first hadn’t information from the market, and I was able to use this to make a lot of connections and help these games go to market or even advise them on how to launch successfully,” the Forbes Web3 gaming creator of the year explains.
“I wasn’t the one that thought I would ever be an adviser,” he laughs, having built a loyal fanbase in the Axie Infinity esports days, where he was a regular in the top 100 leaderboards.
The Web2-to-Web3 gamer says that creating gaming content for his social media followers is already a full-time job on its own. And, of course, he still has to play games regularly to stay good at it. He first made his money through gaming tournaments.
“So it is a very interesting journey from playing games to actually doing business and doing content creation,” he says.
“We obviously cannot really disclose the figures and stuff like that, but it is very niche, and not everyone can do it.”
Meanwhile, Yellow Panther says a lot of games are screwing up their token launches.
“They are really, really annoyed at the launches of the tokens because many of these games are rushing to launch, and usually the [price] chart will go up to straight down upon launching,” he explains.
“There is not enough liquidity, there is not enough hype, and the games are not doing it right,” he explains.
He gets why players who spend “months” farming for play-to-earn airdrops get annoyed when they finally happen and are only worth “10 or 20 bucks.”
“You know you’d rather work a normal Web2 job,” he says.
Web3 gaming and the crypto bull run: Parallel co-founder
The crypto bull run triggered by Donald Trump’s victory in the United States election will give a big boost to Web3 games, says the co-founder of sci-fi-based competitive card game Parallel, Sascha Darius Mojtahedi.
“I think the downstream effects of the positive rhetoric around crypto, in general, is going to have a pretty material impact over the adoption of these games in the next two to three years,” he tells Web3 Gamer at the YGG Play Summit.
But only for the games that survived the rough last few years and not those gaming projects that turned out to be “not legitimate” or which never “delivered,” Mojtahedi explains.
“I attribute that to ignorance rather than malice,” he says of his glass-half-full take.
“A lot of people just weren’t capable of delivering but wanted to deliver, so let’s just assume that’s true.”
Mojtahedi says that games currently in the market have this “immense opportunity ahead of them,” particularly as they no longer have to worry about departing Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler declaring their business model a security.
“I think that kind of going away, and leaving room for people to innovate again, opens up all kinds of opportunities for people to be creative and create really meaningful new experiences, and new types of economies that are ownable.”
Parallel’s next title is Parallel Colony, an AI-powered Web3 survival simulation game launching in Q1 2025. “You’re not the player, the AI agents are the player,” he explains.
Mojtahedi is excited about experimenting with AI and crypto gaming.
“When there’s nothing to kind of compare it to, you actually have the opportunity to outsize, because no one’s ever tried it before,” he says.
“There’s interest and excitement around it,” he adds.
Earn ‘questing rewards’ for experimenting with YGG
Game development platform Immutable and blockchain gaming guild protocol Yield Guild Games have created a $1 million fund for players to earn rewards through questing incentives.
“Gamers that are in it from sort of more a play-to-earn perspective, it allows them to get items that otherwise they would have to pay to get,” Immutable chief studio officer Justin Hulog tells Web3 Gamer.
“It’s not sort of dissimilar to Twitch, where there are Twitch drops if you watch Twitch along the way,” Hulog adds.
Basically, any gamer playing Immutable games that interacts with other Web3 games in the YGG ecosystem can earn rewards like skins, characters, or guardians.
For example, if you’re into Guild of Guardians and want to try the tactical strategy game Shardbound, you’ll earn rewards just for exploring that game since it’s part of the YGG ecosystem.
“It allows us to kind of put together specific quests and specific worlds for people who are in both ecosystems,” Hulog explains.
Other News
— Federation Internationale de Football Association and blockchain gaming studio Mythical Games have teamed up to launch FIFA Rivals, a free-to-play soccer game on iOS and Android.
— Axie Infinity has launched its event The Wings of Nightmare, where Axies have the chance to transform into collectible Axies and potentially earn a spot in the Nightmare Hall of Fame.
— Blockchain gaming company Game7 has released a gaming report revealing that Telegram captured 21% of new game launches in 2024.
— YGG has launched Onchain Guilds on Coinbase’s Base Network.
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