As 2024 draws to a close, we’re excited to reflect on a year of monumental growth and transformative progress at YOM. Much like Spotify has wrapped up my listening history (Tyler Childers in the #1 spot again!), it feels only right to present our community with a “wrap-up” of our accomplishments. This is a moment to celebrate our wins, reflect on our lessons, and prepare for an even bigger 2025. Let’s review!
The Big Stuff
We’ve made major advances in three key areas, the technology, the business, and the community. There’s no way to say that each grew in equal measure, because the tech team really blew the doors off. But advancements have been made in each that we are rightly proud of.
The team has exceeded expectations in achieving our technology-focused milestones. Our Unreal Engine 5 SDK is complete, and partners are actively integrating it in preparation for the Open Alpha test. We’ve simplified processes like mapping keyboard inputs to mobile touchscreens, aiming to enable any AAA UE 5 game to be played on any device.
We successfully showcased our nodes at the Star Atlas Impact event in Singapore and subsequently set up additional devices in Amsterdam homes. This closed Alpha network demonstrated the superiority of low latency peer-to-peer connections to partners, with minimal latency in game streaming from Amsterdam to the US and the Philippines. This highlights the significant advantage of peer-to-peer connections over the limitations of centralized data center cloud gaming.
To prove the same network’s capabilities to the public as we did in more private settings, we considered releasing demo games with limited network capacity. However, we chose to wait until more nodes were active to really blast all doors open and to ensure perfection at release. ;-)
On the business front, we secured funding and a spot in the prestigious Outlier Ventures/Borderless Capital DePIN incubator program, which opened the door to our partnership with peaq, the Layer1 blockchain made for DePIN. Through some connections made at the various conferences we spoke at, including NFT NYC, Token 2049 in Dubai and again in Singapore, Consensus, and Bitcoin 2024, we got warm introductions into both Epic and NVIDIA, among others. We were fast tracked into the NVIDIA Inception Program with their technology and investment opportunities and were accepted into Google for Startups and the Intel and Microsoft programs.
Early in the year we launched the app.yom.ooo to build up the community leaderboard and allow our supporters to earn reputation, $YRX, which will play an important role in both earning through the nodes and in governance in the future. The engagement with this app has been a key metric as we speak to partners and investors. Then, mid-year, peaq put us on stage in Singapore and introduced us to their entire ecosystem of DePIN projects through their Get Real campaign, which just kicked off last month. In the short time we’ve been in their orbit, we’ve substantially added to our engagement rate on X and grown our Discord and Telegram communities equally well. All in all, we’re rightly excited about the growth of our community, especially in this most recent quarter.
Throughout the year, leadership roles and responsibilities shifted and evolved. We saw our engineers step up and grab components of their own accord as we shared the motto “Go to the sound of the guns!” with them. As we round the year off, we’ve determined to move some titles around to more closely match the tasks each of us are taking on, which has led to a major promotion for one of our leading engineers. To better align titles with tasks, we’ve made some changes. Jorrit, our co-founder and CTO for most of the year, has assumed the role of CEO due to his central position in strategy, token planning, and growth projections. Andy, instrumental in business planning and sales, is now Chief Commercial Officer (CCO). Rohan Solanki, demonstrating strong technology leadership, has been promoted to Chief Technology Officer (CTO), ensuring the tech team has efficient access to leadership. Jeff remains our Chief Experience Officer (CXO). Rohan has been with YOM for more than 3 years, and this change allows the tech team faster access to their CTO that would have been possible if Jorrit tried to cover all the bases. Our Chief Experience Officer (CXO) Jeff remains unchanged. These changes are positioned to give YOM the maximum opportunity for growth at the fastest pace in a market where we already lead the way.
Challenges and Lessons
Community management and marketing faced ongoing hurdles. Despite our efforts, we struggled to engage the community with the same passion we felt internally. We’ve recently made changes to address this, but we’re still learning and growing. The founders are now more directly involved in the community and marketing activities and have engaged with a community management team that is closer to home. Shout-outs to our new mods: Sarwar, Hamza, Jane and Jack! Easy to see that their passion for the project is on par with the rest on the team!
Fundraising has been a struggle due to a dry market throughout spring, summer, and fall, which hampered also the marketing ambitions we had in place for Q4. In spite of this we did achieve our goals on a technical level and we are close to launching the Test Net.
Plans for 2025
Looking ahead, we have set goals for 2025, some modest and some audacious. We are updating the roadmap to address these new plans, and I’ll highlight some of these and others we’ll talk about in later articles and Town Halls, as well as provided in a new Roadmap graphic once it is finished.
Network Expansion
First, in Q1, we’ll be migrating from the closed Alpha Network to a public Test Net. This means sending our sample game to friends and others through Telegram and fighting over the top score as the leaderboard is posted after gameplay. And — we will be publicly sharing data about the nodes.
Game Launches
Also during Q1, our tech team will be working and supporting our first game launches, MvR Roughneck Rumble, K4 Rally, and Domenation, to get them operational during the test period. We want to offer a variety of game experiences and reach their communities with our cloud gaming solution early in the year.
Node Sales
In concert with the release of the public Test Net, we will be preparing the node sales. We expect that proof of gameplay will be a major motivator for node purchase. We’ve seen other nodes being sold to consumers without any demand or any revenue being generated, something we want to avoid for our community.
YOM Token on peaq
Alongside all of these technological happenings, we will be bringing our token over to the peaq network and then making the token omnichain. A full article is being prepared to cover this topic, as we know it is a big event for our project and community. The point to make here is that it is timed along with the network going live, games launching, and the nodes and licenses available for purchase.
Sincere Thank You
It has been a full, exciting, challenging, and exhausting year all at the same time. We have strong voices in the community who aren’t afraid to call us to account, and where some projects might wilt at this, we welcome it. For my own part, I’ve enjoyed being a part of this adventure and sharing it through the various Medium articles, Town Halls, and conference events I have been a part of. For the entire team at YOM, we’d like to thank all of our supporters and welcome all of the new community members. As chock-full as 2024 has been, 2025 is expected to be even bigger.
If you have not yet joined our growing Telegram or Discord communities, this is your encouragement to do that. And follow us on X and subscribe to our YouTube, as our Town Halls are streamed to both every Thursday at 5PM UTC.
We are still evaluating testers for the later waves of the Alpha test, looking for people in various regions of the world who can test various conditions for us. This is a great opportunity to play a vital role in our groundbreaking revolution for the gaming industry! You can find all of the information to be a part of it here: https://t.co/didipEXeDT
Also, if earning passive income by either delegating a license or turning your gaming rig into a node has interest for you, sign up to our allow list here: www.yom.ooo/nodemint
Final Word
A final point about YOM and doing cloud gaming right. We’ve said several times in various forums that GPU cycles are a growingly sought after commodity. AI is causing a massive drain on the available cycles at data centers, and to this point the only solution offered is to ‘build more data centers’, despite the environmental impact this will inevitably lead to. Not to mention that this just makes revenue more centralized into the hands of the few.
Decentralized cloud gaming, allowing underutilized and untapped GPU cycles to be sold to game development studios, offering a nearly free network to propagate their creative ideas, and allowing anyone with the internet the ability to access those titles, is why YOM exists. We will expand the gaming space, decentralize revenue into local economies, alleviate the environmental impacts where we can, and turn the internet 3D. Audacious goals, for certain, and with our community behind us, we’ll get there.
CXO out!
