Case study · Yield Guild Games
Choosing What to Reward as Participation Grew
I led YGG’s participation program through early growth, balancing rewards with useful contribution, repeat activity, and the work required to run it.
At a glance
The central choice and its limits.
- My responsibility
- I managed GAP’s growth, rewards, operations, and community work, then initiated its move toward product tools. I negotiated cycle budgets; final financial approval sat elsewhere.
- Key decision
- I weighed value to participants, the community, and partners against likely participation and reward cost. I also gave experienced community members more responsibility.
- Trade-off
- I favored controlled, repeat participation over short-lived volume. I accepted fewer completions when the work did not justify its rewards, and kept review for high-risk decisions.
- Result or status
- Participants meeting program criteria grew from 545 to 3,190, and qualifying activity per person rose. Revenue emerged as the program developed; in my assessment, it was moving toward sustainability. These were shared outcomes.
Context and problem
YGG’s Guild Advancement Program (GAP) rewarded people for completing quests: defined activities in games, around games, and in the wider community. Some involved creating content, building skills, or helping run parts of the program. I joined after its launch, while the way it operated was still taking shape.
Growth came first. As the program developed, repeat participation, useful contribution, revenue, and the cost of rewards mattered more. The challenge was to grow without rewarding activity that added little value or making the program too difficult to run.
My role
I managed the program’s growth, activities and rewards, day-to-day operations, and work with community contributors. I negotiated budgets for each cycle, while final financial approval remained elsewhere. As repeated operating problems became harder to manage, I initiated the move toward product tools and helped define their requirements. Internal teams and community members shared the delivery and results.
Key decisions
1. Decide which activity deserves rewards
More completions were easy to count. They did not show whether a quest helped participants, the community, or partners. I assessed proposals by what they asked people to do, the value of that contribution, likely participation, and reward cost. Sometimes I accepted fewer completions rather than reward activity whose value did not justify its cost.
2. Share responsibility, with limits
The GAP Council brought community members into shaping and running the program, beyond the work of YGG employees. Experienced members could propose activities, create content, support operations, and take on more decisions over time. I helped widen that responsibility while keeping review where choices could affect budgets, partners, or reputation.
3. Address the work behind the growth
Each added quest brought more content, files, checks, and publishing work. Without common standards, that content could become difficult to maintain. I helped turn repeated failures into requirements for shared records and tools, with enough flexibility for changing program goals and participant needs. Rules could catch predictable errors; people still needed to judge quality, fraud, and partner constraints.
See how this became product work →
Outcomes
More people qualified. Average activity rose.
Bars start at zero; compare lengths within each pair. The two pairs have different units and scales. The reported 24.5% uses underlying values; averages shown here are rounded. These program results do not isolate the effect of my work.
331 of 545 came back. Of participants who met the program’s criteria in the first cycle I worked on, 60.7% completed a quest in the following cycle. That shows repeat activity, without establishing loyalty beyond rewards.
Moving toward a more sustainable model.
Revenue emerged as the program grew. Partners generated most of it at first; users contributed a smaller share later, and that share increased. As we refined rewards and operations and moved toward product tools, I saw the program getting closer to a sustainable model.
What I would keep and what I would change
Keep testing value, not only volume. I would again accept fewer completions when a quest’s likely contribution did not justify its rewards. Even with growth as the immediate goal, activity without useful work could consume rewards without strengthening the program.
Make the test easier to challenge. Before increasing rewards, I would state what useful participation should look like for users, the community, and partners, then compare that with cost and repeat activity. I would still choose value over volume when they pulled apart; clearer measures would help others test and improve that judgment.