Yumerium is a next-gen, decentralized gaming platform that integrates payments, game development, and community participation by gamers worldwide into one comprehensive solution to overcome long-standing issues in online gaming such as fraud, high transaction fees, and delayed payments.

The platform runs on a native token called YUM, which can be earned by playing, sharing, and reviewing games. By supporting transactions made in YUM, Yumerium provides an easier and more efficient way for game developers and studios to create and market games. This allows them to more easily grow their active users and overall brand. Gamers also benefit from lower costs and the ability to earn while playing the games they love.

The world’s media and entertainment market is worth an estimated 1.7 trillion dollars. With consistent double-digit growth year on year for the past decade or so, this market is expected to hit a value of 2.2 trillion dollars over the next three years.

Gaming is an integral segment of the global entertainment market and it currently has a value of roughly 110 billion dollars. The world’s largest gaming regions are Asia Pacific and North America, and these two regions account for over 75 percent of global gaming revenues. Within general gaming, online gaming has seen particularly explosive growth, as can be inferred from the fact that digital gaming sales outperform physical game sales by a factor of 3. With a global gamer population of over one billion (with 70% of them playing online games), these statistics prove one thing: online gaming is, to put it very simply, a market with immeasurable potential.

Advancements in gaming experiences have included social gaming, mobile gaming, and free-to-play gaming that has slowly overcome pay-to-play gaming. With the rise of e-sports and continued development of games that make them more interactive, natural, and fun, we are now seeing a dramatic rise in the popularity of earn-to-play games. If you think about it, the reasons for this are quite obvious: Who wouldn’t want to play games they love as a career? This can only continue to happen, however, if we create better gaming solutions, more efficient and reliable ways of doing things, provide better integrations to payments, and improve transparency in gaming ecosystems.

Current state-of-the-art solutions do not do these things, and these are the obstacles that Yumerium has set out to overcome.

As with any industry, there are various issues and obstacles that must be overcome before the market is fair, flexible, transparent, efficient, and encourages participation by not just large entities but by private individuals and smaller setups as well.

Today’s gaming industry is dominated by a handful of large players. Corporate gaming publishers such as Tencent, Square Enix, Zynga, and Gameloft rake in billions of dollars in revenue every year. A similar consolidation of earnings can be seen with Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store – two of the most popular sources of games to the general public. This type of centralization of publishing power, market reach, revenue pooling, and overall market presence gives these large corporations enormous influence. YouTube can delete videos and Facebook can lock accounts if they want to, just as the App and Play stores can remove app listings, withhold earnings, or levy penalties for trivial breaches of contracts if they feel the need to.

This centralization is the source of many of the problems we see in gaming today. There are high fees, as well as substantial delays, for making game payments that must go through third parties, not to mention a lack of support for multi-party as well as micro payments along with fraud and a lack of transparency. These issues not only limit the ability to properly transfer value created by gamers, but they also pose serious challenges to growing user participation – a serious issue that not only reduces the overall value to the gaming community but also threatens the existence of gaming communities in general.

This is where Yumerium comes in. Blockchain and smart contract technologies have opened up a new era of gaming. Gamers can now earn game tokens by participating in games, and the tokens can, in turn, be used for buying game money, which can, in turn, be used to buy in-game items. This has exponentially increased gamer engagement and adds a lot to the gaming experience.

Existing solutions in centralized games that give full control of transactions to one party have critical limits in supporting proper value exchange in games. However, because blockchain and smart contract technology, by definition, provide solutions that are transparent, auditable, tamper-resistant (meaning no fraud), and can be configured in any way (meaning both small as well as large payments and transactions can be catered to), we can now create self-sustaining gaming ecosystems that support fun and fluid experiences that are fair, flexible, and open to all, and they also provide the support needed for new experiences that are expected to continue to grow over time, experiences such as earn-to-play, as mentioned above.

How will it do this? Yumerium will create a platform that combines the four key components required for any collaborative and online gaming endeavor to be successful:

Growing a developer base

Attracting a community through rewards

Democratically crowdfunding projects that people are interested in

Providing a decentralized payment gateway for services

Growing a developer base:

It is not uncommon for game developers and studios to be paid several months after their work. Furthermore, high transaction and processing fees further reduce net income, and the use of insecure third-party trading sites puts developers and studios at risk of fraud as well. These issues limit developer participation and they reduce the incentive (i.e. earnings) that could otherwise be enjoyed on a platform that removes these concerns from the minds of developers and allows them to focus on what they love doing: creating games that people love.

In addition to this, developers who register on Yumerium are allocated a certain amount of the platform’s native token called YUM to help cover startup costs and run marketing campaigns for referrals and bonuses which attract more gamers who then generate and use more YUM, creating a snowball effect of playing and paying.

Rewards-based gaming community:

The platform also works as a community where players can share their experiences and opinions with other users and earn rewards for doing so.

Gaming reviews are an integral part of the gaming industry, so by rewarding them with YUM, gamers are encouraged to leave reviews, share social links, watch promotional videos, and provide other types of community help such as tutorials, guides, strategies, and hints. This fair and balanced incentivizing of contributions to the community and the platform also leads to efficient viral marketing for developers to benefit from.

Crowdfunding:

The platform allows registered developers to raise funds for games they want to make. Players can vote on the games they want by contributing YUM towards the development of the projects of their choice. This way, only the games that people want are made, and the games that are eventually made are the ones that people want. This is a win-win for both players and developers!

Next-gen decentralized payment gateway:

Yumerium will leverage and implement blockchain and smart contracts to create a decentralized payment system that will support both gamers as well as developers, providing them with higher efficiency, safety, and cost-savings. Transactions on the platform are instantaneous and costs are near-zero, and this results not only in lower overall costs (savings that can be used elsewhere), but it also encourages more frequent purchasing of in-game items and add-ons that would otherwise be too costly or time-consuming to purchase.

The Yumerium platform is being developed by Subdream Labs, a team with a strong track record in the games industry, especially when it comes to influencing gaming models. The company is particularly well-known as the creator of GalaNet and gPotato, two earlier projects that paved the way for free-to-play games that not only flourished but subsequently became the most popular revenue model for mobile games today.

By building Yumerium with an initial 2.2 million dollars raised globally from accredited investors, the company has a vision of disrupting the gaming industry by leveraging blockchain and smart contract technology. Yumerium will have its Token Sale later this month, which is scheduled to start on May 24, 2018.

To learn more about the project, visit www.yumerium.com. If you are interested in community participation and want to win free YUM, a useful list of bounties you can compete for is available at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3276979.0