YGG Play has announced a publishing partnership with Delabs Games, the Web3 arm of 4:33 Creative Lab, to launch its newest title, Gigachadbat, on Abstract Chain.
Designed as a bite-sized and easy-to-pick-up baseball game, Gigachadbat lets players swing and score points that can be redeemed for YGG tokens and Abstract XP. The game launched today.
[Update: We interview Delabs Games co-CEO Joonmo Kwon and YGG Play CEO Gabby Dizon after the release came out, and you can see that below].
The partnership represents a major step for YGG Play, as its publishing expertise and track record with LOL Land—which grossed over $1 million in August 2025, following the game’s debut just two months earlier—positions it as the ideal publisher to bring Gigachadbat to the global Casual Degen audience, players who value light and accessible gaming experiences.
“We’re thrilled to partner with YGG Play on Gigachadbat,” said Joonmo Kwon, founder and co-CEO of Delabs Games, in a statement. “This is more than publishing—it’s about creating a fun, snackable experience with a fast core loop, simple mechanics anyone can pick up instantly, and the added thrill of redeeming points for $YGG.”
Delabs Games is a South Korean Web3 game development studio led by co-CEOs Joonmo Kwon and JC Kim, and backed by investors including Hashed, Spartan Group, and TON Ventures.
Yield Guild Games (YGG) also invested in Delabs Games in a Strategic Round as well as a Series A in June and August 2024, respectively, marking YGG’s early commitment and alignment with the studio’s long-term vision for Web3 gaming. Since its launch in 2023, the Delabs ecosystem has grown to over 25 million users, with a gaming portfolio that includes Rumble Racing Star, Boxing Star X, and Ragnarok Libre.
Joonmo Kwon, aka JMK, is a 25-year veteran of the gaming industry and the former CEO of Nexon, one of the world’s leading video game developers and publishers. During his tenure at Nexon, JMK significantly expanded the company’s portfolio, bringing globally celebrated titles such as Crazy Racing Kartrider, MapleStory, Dungeon Fighter Online, and Mabinogi to millions of players worldwide.
After leaving Nexon, he founded 4:33 Creative Lab, the parent company of Delabs Games, which rose to prominence with the success of Blade, the first mobile game to win the prestigious Korea Game Awards.
JMK is widely recognized as a pioneer in mobile gaming, having led the development of the first Unreal Engine-powered MMORPG on mobile, delivering console-quality graphics to handheld devices. He also introduced innovative gyroscope-based controls for real-time player-versus-player (PVP) battles, a feature that has become a standard in competitive mobile gaming.
Kim brings deep technical expertise and a strong background in Web3 game development. In 2017, he was recognized as one of the top 30 young innovators in enterprise technology by Forbes Asia.
He also serves as the CEO of Planetarium Labs, where he led the launch of the Web3 game Immortal Rising 2, which was deployed on Immutable zkEVM powered by Polygon. He also created Verse8, a next-generation AI game maker and playground leveraging a WebGL game engine, LLM, and MCP integration.
“I really respect Joonmo, JC, and the Delabs team. They’ve built some of the world’s most successful games and bring decades of credibility and expertise to Web3,” said Gabby Dizon, cofounder of YGG, in a statement. “Their vision of accessible Web3 games matches our goals for the Casual Degen audience, and we’re going to make sure Gigachadbat reaches its full potential.”
Gigachadbat currently has nearly 26,000 followers on X. The game launched today alongside an exclusive Gigachadbat-themed map for LOL Land. The game will also have a launch event on September 22, 2025, during Korea Blockchain Week (KBW) 2025.
Gigachadbat is a casual degen game that puts instinct and reflexes to the test. Players step up to bat, make the call, and swing for points — every round is a chance to prove the gut and flex their skills. With snackable gameplay loops, community bragging rights and onchain rewards, Gigachadbat delivers a mix of fun, flex, and replayability.
Interview with Delabs and YGG Play leaders
I asked Dizon and Kwon in our interview why they chose Abstract Chain. They noted that platform owners often charge 30% fees in transactions. That’s not only true for Apple and Google, but also for platforms like Telegram. By contrast, Abstract Chain takes small fees out of native decentralized exchange between chains and it doesn’t take the 30% “rake” that other platforms do.
“They have a blockchain, but they’ve built what is essentially a Web3 specific app store on top of it, so it has Web3 apps. What’s nice is that they can drive discoverability. They have a good paying user base, and the most important thing is that they don’t take any app store cut,” Dizon said. “It’s been really good actually, working with the Abstract team.”
That store doesn’t have a huge reach yet, but the app store draws people who don’t mind paying for apps, and so it has a good base of paying players.
Kwon said that Gigachadbat is the company’s “blockbuster” game with a good set of initial users. Delabs Games has had successes with Boxing Star and World Baseball Star PvP games. This title, however, has been modified to be a short and fast instant title, so it’s more like a “Degen light” game. Degen is a reference to players who explore the boundaries of cryptocurrency games.
Kwon met Dizon about a month ago and they both got excited about the Abstract platform.
“This is a no cut, no commission, no rake for the platform. So this is perfect for the Web3 players,” Kwon said.
Dizon said that when there is an upvote on the app store, it’s a small blockchain transaction paid out in a micro amount. The revenues scale up when the user base grows. Otherwise, it’s free to use and the wallet is abstracted from the users so the complicated cryptocurrency onboarding is masked from brand new players.
Dizon said that YGG Play believes that casual Degen players could become a valuable audience and this kind of game is targeted at them. They’re the crypto people who like to trade NFTS, meme coins and play at the same time.
YGG Play released its LOL Land game on May 23 as a casual Web3 board game. It was successful, drawing 25,000 players at launch. In July, the game hit 631,000 monthly active players. That’s not a ton, but the average revenue per paying user is above $1,000, far above many games. And it has generated more than $3 million to date and has an annualized revenue projection of about $64 million.
Dizon said since that game was a hit, YGG Play started looking for more games that fit that mold, and so they talked with Kwon about moving the game from Telegram to Abstract Chain. They turned it into a web experience and used Abstract as a discovery layer. Dizon said his company is also working on its own discovery plans.
For now, the casual player is the kind that doesn’t think of themselves as gamers. They’re also targeting players who like to trade tokens and don’t really play games all day.
“We wanted to go after the bigger user base in crypto, which were people who were trading, flipping meme coins, NFTs, trading on exchanges, and giving them these Degen experiences that are very easily accessible,” Dizon said.
The state of Web3 games
Cryptocurrency has become more popular, particularly in the U.S. under the Trump administration. The financial regulations of the Biden administration are no longer being enforced, and the Republican-controled government has passed the pro-crypto Genius Act. That’s all positive for cryptocurrency, and when crypto owners feel wealthier, they spend more on Web3 games.
But Western gamers have been skeptical of Web3 games as scams or lacking fun gameplay. The adoption in countries such as South Korea has been much stronger, Kwon said. And in Asia, the acceptance of Web3 games has moved far ahead of the West.
Because there are some big spenders in Web3 games, the blockchain games can subsist on smaller numbers of players or even turn a profit with relatively low player counts.
“We have seen some improvements that happened just because crypto got more popular and we got more clarity in the U.S.,” Dizon said. “It has a little less of a stigma now. At least in the previous administration, you felt like you were doing something illegal, and that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.
Future Market Insights predicts the global Web3 gaming industry will grow from $33.7 billion in 2025 to over $184 billion by 2035, reflecting a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of nearly 18.5%. Of course, many skeptics don’t believe such numbers.
The growth potential is why company’s such as Kwon’s Delabs Games are making Web3 games. Kwon came from very successful gaming roots. His first startup, Entelligent, was acquired by Nexon in 2005. He became the CEO of Nexon Mobile in 2005, and he started 4:33 Creative Lab in 2009. It became one of South Korea’s top mobile game publishers. In 2020, he started Delabs Games under 4:33.
Delabs Games had another hit in Rumble Racing Star, a kart-racing game which saw millions of downloads. Yet Kwon acknowledges making games is hard. About one in 100 games is a hit, and there have not been many hit Web3 games yet.
“That’s why the growth is very slow,” he said.
Kwon believes that token-based games can contaminate the drive to play fun games. He thinks the tokens undermine intrinsic motivation to play.
But in South Korea, the medieval MMORPG Web3 game Night Crows has been a success. Made by Madngine and published by Wemade, the game debuted in 2024 and has generated more than $300 million to date, even though most of the players are Web2 players. Mir5 has also been a big hit in South Korea’s Web3 gaming market.
Dizon believes that the increasing adoption of Stablecoins like USDC — tokens that are meant to be used as stable cryptocurrencies for buying and selling — are helping to normalize the acceptance of cryptocurrency and the use of Stablecoins for payments.
“Once you see games that take USDC becoming more and more common, then you will see faster adoption of crypto games,” said Dizon.
As for Gigachadbat, the game will likely add more PvP and event updates. And Dizon is looking forward to the YGG Summit in Manila in November.