By mcsauceth and 0xSong from Impossible Research

The rise of play-to-earn in recent months can be attributed to a variety of factors, with play-to-earn guilds often being at the forefront, as they provide invaluable benefits to play-to-earn games looking to gain increased mindshare within the space. Either in the form of boosting daily active users from scholarships, social media marketing, or direct financial investments, guilds are a crucial cog and component for success within the machine which is play-to-earn.

Play-to-Earn guilds have seen massive success within their gaming operations, as their ability to scale within Axie Infinity and other play-to-earn games continue to increase, allowing them to accumulate monetary assets for reinvestment and expansion. However, with success comes competition, and this can be seen within the increase in the number of play-to-earn guilds forming within the play-to-earn space. With this in mind, Impossible Finance aims to educate its community and provide the necessary knowledge of the play-to-earn guild space and its respective offerings. In this report, we analyze in detail eight different play-to-earn guilds, comparing both their quantitative and qualitative aspects as well as an investment thesis.

We were able to reach out to 15 different play-to-earn guilds and have compiled this report based on the availability of data both compiled and provided to the Impossible Research team. We are happy to update this if we are excluding any play-to-earn guilds or games that would like to be included within future reports. All data was gathered and compiled by the 8th of February 2022 and therefore does not reflect the changes implemented by Axie Infinity within the Season 20 economic balance.

Quantitative Comparisons:

Qualitative Comparisons:

Ancient 8
Ancient8 is Vietnam’s largest blockchain gaming guild, incubated by Coin98 Labs, Kyros Ventures, Coin68 Media, and 3twelve Capital. Ancient8 aims to develop a platform that enables their community to gain the opportunity to play and build within the metaverse while earning rewards. Ancient8 has been able to grow into one of the most successful gaming guilds through the use of investments, scholarships & education to grow its community. Investments within up-and-coming play-to-earn games and top quality play-to-earn NFTs allow Ancient8 to constantly be at the forefront of the play-to-earn scene by having the ability to provide these productive assets to its community members through the use of scholarships. Game reviews within e-sports tournaments for Axie Infinity, such as introductions to Thetan Arena, and crypto basics for its community members, allows Ancient8’s scholars to always be on top of game metas and strategies. Finally, Ancient8 is able to pride itself on not being just a traditional gaming guild, but also the largest gaming community within Vietnam, giving it a strong base of players within southeast Asia.

1. Assets Under Management:
   Undisclosed
2. Scholar statistics and Revenue Splits:
   Ancient8’s Axie Infinity scholarship program currently boasts more than 1,000 scholars and is aiming to grow its scholarship pool within other play-to-earn games such as Thetan Arena and Cyball. Ancient8 is looking to add an additional 1,000 scholars to its Cyball Scholarship program once it is officially launched. The take rate between Ancient8 and its scholars is undisclosed and is likely to vary depending from scholar to scholar. However, Ancient8 believes in rewarding scholars based on numerous quantitative and qualitative factors such as the amount of time spent as a scholar under Ancient8, following guild policies, achieving high rankings within respective play-to-earn games, contributing back towards the Ancient8 community, and joining Ancient8 as an official employee.
3. Revenue:
   Undisclosed
4. Quantitative Statistic

1. P2E Games:
   Ancient8’s investments and participation within play-to-earn games have mainly revolved around Axie Infinity, Thetan Arena, and Cyball, but their commitment to the play-to-earn scene has allowed them to further expand into Sipher, Summoners Arena, and Elpis Battle.
2. DAO/Guild Structure:
   Ancient8 is currently building towards a DAO, as it aims to be more decentralized. Currently, Ancient8’s guild structure is relatively simple and fluid, with a single entity that has a claim to all of its assets and investments. As Ancient8 continues to grow, it will be interesting to keep an eye on whether its DAO structure will follow the common subDAO structure for specialized tasks and operations, or whether they will maintain its fluid all-in structure.
3. Value Proposition:
   Ancient8’s key advantage compared to other play-to-earn guilds would be their unique ability to build strong communities and dominate the regional ecosystem in Vietnam. Incubated by Vietnam crypto natives Coin98, Coin68, and Kyros Ventures, Ancient8 has leveraged the substantial support from leading innovators within the space to capture the vast majority of the play-to-earn scene in Vietnam. With the ability to gain exceptional insights and resources within the Vietnam market, Ancient8 has exposed its concentration on this nation. Some people may question why Ancient8 has mainly focused on growing within Vietnam, as Ancient8’s videos and scholarship application process is mainly tailored to the Vietnamese community. However, this should be seen as a competitive advantage Ancient8 has been able to achieve over other guilds.

In particular, targeting a more niche market such as Vietnam is beneficial due to macro reasons itself. According to ChainAnalysis, Vietnam is ranked first in the world for crypto ownership and adoption, which is evident and supported by the rapid rise of Vietnamese crypto companies, projects, and protocols. As evidence of their determining competency, Ancient8 has reached an astounding 73,000 community members from Twitter and Discord alone. With the foundational achievements within the Vietnamese community, Ancient8 constructs its base for going global and aspires to deliver further exceptional value to other nations.

Ancient8 currently has a diverse group of members across South East Asia, Turkey, Korea, Japan, and India. Since its inception, Ancient8 has positioned the community as its highest priority. The Ancient8 Community Alliance (ACA) was founded as their unique initiative to further realize this vision, by leveraging like-minded communities through their alliance partnerships while delivering the power of community and marketing reach to high-quality GameFi projects.

1. Future Plans:
   Ancient8 has dedicated itself to planning to build more blockchain and software products that will improve connectivity for communities within various GameFi projects, helping improve the infrastructure layer for the Metaverse and its offerings. As mentioned above, this can be seen within the formation of Ancient8’s Community Alliance (ACA), which includes alliance partners from leading blockchain communities as well as other play-to-earn guilds. ACA was formed to help empower communities, and help leading GameFi projects better reach additional gamers as well as market themselves to blockchain gaming communities for better opportunities. In addition to that, Ancient8 aims to publish more educational content for its community members, either in the form of additional gameplay reviews for play-to-earn e-sports competitions and top rank matches on their blog allowing Ancient8’s scholars to further educate themselves on the current meta and strategies currently deployed within Axie Infinity, or financial literacy courses within crypto. Ancient8 is currently launching its first NFT collection, with its NFTs aiming to provide access to scholarships, future drops, whitelists for products and events, and community perks. Finally, Ancient8 is aiming to build on the introduction of their Axie Infinity Vietnam Championship, by further establishing competitions within the play-to-earn scene to allow players and its community members the opportunity to showcase their ability by competing against the best players in selected regions!

Good Games Guild
Good Games Guilds is a play-to-earn gaming guild that aims to help create and cultivate the largest virtual world economy by optimizing the use of its own play-to-earn assets as well as loaned play-to-earn assets to ensure maximum returns and rewards for all parties involved. GGG aims to convert asset ownership within the Metaverse into a productive, revenue-generating asset by utilizing the role and function of each guild member. These members will be the generators that turn GGG’s assets from regular assets to productive ones. Additionally, this ownership can be traded or even rented through the NFT marketplace that is owned by GGG.

1. Assets Under Management:
   Undisclosed
2. Scholar statistics and Revenue Splits:
   As of 12th January 2022, Good Games Guilds offers an average split and take rate of 65/35 between scholar/guild. Currently, GGG has 500 active scholars utilizing guild assets for daily revenue within Axie Infinity, averaging around 130 SLP being earned per scholar daily.
3. Revenue:
   Undisclosed
4. Quantitative Statistics:

1. P2E Games:
   Good Games Guilds is currently participating in over 20 play-to-earn games, as they aim to diversify and continue leveraging productive assets to generate multiple revenue streams from gaming operations. GGG is currently involved in Axie Infinity, Elumia, Era7, Elfin, MetaStrike, Wasted Lands, RaceFi, Hero Arena, Age of Tanks, Duelist King, Decimated, and Universe Island.
2. DAO/Guild Structure:
   GGG’s structure is similar to that of Hooga Gaming’s, where Vaults are introduced based on specialization, but GGG’s structure is differentiated using specialized revenue streams instead of operations. Currently, GGG’s vaults are split into three main aspects: Axie Breeding Revenue, Gaming Scholarship Revenue, and NFT marketplace revenue. Revenue from these vaults is then distributed to $GGG holders based on their percentage of total revenue compared to other vaults.
3. Value Proposition:
   GGG has been able to introduce Good Games Labs, an incubator for start-up projects that have successfully passed a series of selections to help nurture and develop these projects into quality play-to-earn games that aim to compete against play-to-earn leaders such as Axie Infinity. Good Games Labs are able to provide support in areas such as marketing and player base, where GGG can collaborate through providing an influx of scholars and thus players within new games, where initial traction of daily active users are often difficult to secure.

In addition to that, the eventual introduction of GGG’s NFT marketplace will allow users to buy and sell GameFi related NFTs on their marketplace, allowing them to gain increased access to game creators, gamers, and artists, allowing GGG to always be in a position to capitalize on changes within the play-to-earn ecosystem. GGG’s NFT marketplace also allows payments in both cryptocurrency and FIAT currency, allowing them to onboard new users of the NFT marketplace at a faster rate. GGG charges a 1.5% tax per sale, allowing them to earn increased revenue whilst offering a competitive rate compared to industry leaders such as OpenSea.

One thing to consider about GGG would be that the daily average SLP earned by scholars per day is relatively low compared to other guilds, with an average of 130 SLP earned per day per scholar. This could be interpreted as a lack of quality by GGG’s scholars, or a lack of quality within GGG’s Axie Infinity NFT assets, and thus GGG’s scholars are unable to keep up with the changing meta and strategy of Axie Infinity.

1. Future Plans:
   GGG is aiming to release its mobile application in the near future to help provide back towards its community and especially its scholars, as it allows users to monitortheir achievements, rankings, and rewards from playing play-to-earn games. This mobile application will also allow scholars to withdraw cryptocurrency assets to FIAT currency instantly, allowing GGG scholars to have access to funds when needed.

GuildFi

GuildFi is a Web3 infrastructure that connects games, NFTs, guilds, and communities, creating an interconnected system where a player's time and efforts are interoperable throughout games and the metaverse. By providing a base for players, GuildFi intends to solve accessibility issues that players normally face when looking at GameFi. What’s more, GuildFi will enable players the opportunity to engage with multiple different games, removing the siloed nature games typically create because of the high start-up cost and the additional complexity within crypto, enabling long-term benefit for the players. In order to enable this, GuildFi’s ecosystem consists of a gaming center, and multiple zones, which can be likened to the various operations within GuildFi. The gaming center is where players will be typically onboarded into the guild and given access to various zones to compliment the player's growth and continue to add value to the overall ecosystem.

1) Assets Under Management:

GuildFi assets under management are currently valued at $146,020,583 as of 16th January 2022. The AUM can be broken down into three main categories, reserves, tokens, and NFTs, highlighted below:

1. Scholar Statistics and Revenue Split:
   Hooga Gaming also offers an extremely competitive take rate between the Guild and its scholars, with the average split between scholars/Hooga Gaming being 70/30. Currently, Hooga Gaming has 350 scholars with the daily average SLP per scholar at 160 SLP.
2. Revenue:
   Hooga Gaming’s revenue can be split into two main streams: Axie Scholarships and Tournament Hostings. Axie Scholarship alone generated a revenue of $350,000 USD in 2021, with Tournament Hostings generating an additional $87,500 USD in revenue, accounting for about 20% of Hooga Gaming’s total revenue in 2021. Total revenue for Hooga Gaming in 2021 was $437,000. Hooga Gaming believes that revenue within the gaming sector will continue to grow within 2022, due to further games launching in Q2 and Q3 of 2022 and coupled with the increase in floor prices of GameFi NFTs, and thus expect healthy demand for GameFi as they continue to launch. Even if play-to-earn rewards decrease, Hooga Gaming expects gaming operation revenue to grow to $400,000 in 2022.