Our highly anticipated GAM3 Awards, a pivotal event within the realm of web3 gaming, is poised for its grand comeback this December 2023. The event's distinguished panel of judges, featuring a mix of familiar personalities from 2022 and fresh faces representing diverse facets of web3 gaming, has just been introduced. Among the noteworthy newcomers are individuals hailing from web3 gaming venture capital firms, experts in blockchain and ecosystem development, trusted infrastructure partners, and creative content creators. These esteemed additions join the ranks of established gaming luminaries and tech titans such as Amazon and Google.

We are proud to introduce one of our jury members Gabby Dizon, a game industry veteran with over 20 years of experience. He co-founded Yield Guild Games (YGG), the world’s first and biggest web3 gaming guild where players can enrich themselves as they find their community, discover games and level up together.

As a strong advocate of the web3 game ecosystem, Gabby is also a founding board member of the Blockchain Game Alliance (BGA), a founding member of the Web3 Gaming Collective (W3GC), and an active angel investor. Gabby’s mission is to help people from all corners of the world find opportunities in web3 and the open Metaverse.

1. What is the most enjoyable part of your role?

“As a founder myself, nothing gets me more excited than working with other passionate founders who think for the long term. You can tell very quickly that those people are entrepreneurs-at-heart that want to build and make their projects succeed. In my experience, those types of people are not motivated by money but by providing a good product to consumers and have conviction in what they are building.”

2. How do you see the progress made in web3 gaming since last year?

“In the last two years, a lot of games have been funded following the success of Axie Infinity and other early web3 games. Many games have adopted the Axie Infinity model, and numerous others are also attempting to enhance the economic and community models. And now we're starting to see these games get better and be released anytime within the next 12 to 24 months. That means there's a lot of really good quality content and very polished games that are coming that you would even play if they weren't web3 games. But now they have these web3 elements like we’re seeing with Axie’s Lunacian Badges to make it even stickier and tools for the community to co-create with the game developers. I also love seeing a lot of the experimentation that's taking place, along with the programs that YGG is implementing like the Guild Advancement Program (GAP) and Superquests.”

3. What is the most valuable addition web3 brings into gaming, from your perspective, if any?

“An interesting thing in web3 is that you can check someone's wallet to see their transaction history, assets in different games, and achievements through soulbound tokens. We have a questing program called the Guild Advancement Program (GAP), which runs every three months. It allows people to earn achievements in the games we work with, like My Pet Hooligan, Axie, Pixels, and others. This provides more information about their gaming preferences and accomplishments. For example, if we partner with a game and someone has a YGG Badge, we can see their achievements and if they've played similar games in the same genre. Then we can design offers or quests for them. We collaborate closely with games to create quests for people to try out and get rewards. We're pioneering this with our community and aim to scale it further.”

4. What is your outlook on 2024 and beyond for web3 gaming?

“We are seeing an evolution in the quality of the games themselves being made. After Axie showed that there was a viable business model in web3 gaming, a lot of other experienced web3 game developers started their web3 gaming startups and got funded by VCs. But typically the development time of a good game is between 2-3 years so we are not seeing high-quality products come in until maybe the end of this year to early next year, and I think by next year we are going to see a lot of good products that resemble a lot of the mainstream games that people play today but have some kind of tokenized elements in their economy that can be owned by its players.”

The return of our GAM3 Awards in 2023 promises to be a celebration of the web3 gaming industry's growth and innovation. With industry figures like Gabby Dizon on the jury, the event is set to recognize excellence in the ever-evolving world of web3 gaming.