Scholarships, yield guilds, rented NFT characters – all those approaches help new players test out a game and achieve earnings without paying. In exchange for playable characters, scholars lend their skills and time for the game.
A scholarship is a way for several people to organize and share in the earnings from a game. The idea first originated with Axie Infinity, where characters were scarce and expensive. Scholarships depend on the game’s economy, and with Axie characters, one of the problems was that there was less demand from scholars and less payback.
Do Other Games Include Scholarships
Once the idea of scholarships took off, other games saw organizations that brought together character buyers and investors. Games that resemble Axie Infinity and use playable characters also get added to organizations building yield guilds.
The advantage of a scholarship is that the guild can pick up more advanced or rare items, opening up more exciting gameplay.
It’s not unusual for guilds to support several of the most widely played games.
How to Join a Guild or Gain a Scholarship
Scholarship opportunities or another form of play for rent are available through social media or chats like Discord.
Twitter is also a source of up-to-date searches, as some play guilds add new games almost daily.
For Axie Infinity scholarships, the Coingecko info page for Smooth Love Potion (SLP) has a list of scholarships with the player rate transparently presented.
What are the Top Scholarship Guilds
Yield Guild: This is one of the most widely known and well-financed scholarship organizations. Yield Guild has issued its own YGG native token that is traded on exchanges and has attracted additional funding from VC sources.
Yield Guild helps by aggregating the games with the best earning opportunities, ensuring a steady income from playing.
- Liberty Gaming Guild: The main goal of Liberty Gaming Guild is to give access to NFT games that were previously inaccessible due to high initial costs. In addition to Axie Infinity, Liberty offers scholarships for Alien Worlds, League of Kingdoms, The Sandbox, CryptoBlades and Splinterlands.
- RoboFi Guild: This play to earn scholarship guild offers full funding to players. Applications are open for Axie Infinity, Illuvium, My Neighbor Alice, and Decentraland.
- Avisa Games Guild: This guild combines a game club and aggregator with a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) to find the best P2E opportunities and redistribute earnings. This guild goes the extra mile with attention to community and a personalized approach to scholars.
FTX Exchange also lends support through its own partnership scheme, as the market operator moved into NFT and gaming in the past months.
Tips for Scholars
Becoming a scholar requires participation in an online community. The best approach is to be friendly and follow instructions, in the end adding value for all. Guilds and scholarship hubs will usually target specific regions, giving more chance to applicants. Some have preferential conditions for students.
Scholars, or the receivers of scholarships, have a choice of cashing out their rewards. But some games will not be sustainable with a constant selling of the reward token. The conditions of some scholarships thus have another goal – allowing the scholar to work toward owning their own team of characters. This would circle the tokens back into the game, while preserving the value of playable characters.
Scholarship is a relatively low-risk way to test out games and earn income. Scholarships may not guarantee income, but they cut the risk of buying expensive NFT characters.
