Author: dev.samal84

Wallet: 0x8785165e9E489357014E4275Fb3502e76E97935A

Disclaimer : Please note that we are not associated with the ICO nor are paid for preparing this review. This is our personal opinion and contributors are advised to do their due diligence before contributing to the ICO.

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. 

We have analysed the ICO based on the below parameters:

1. Necessity or problem statement (12%)

2. White paper (9%)

3. Product Status (10%)

4. Team (10%)

5. ICO Pricing (7%)

6. Business Model/Revenue Source (15%)

7. Token Value Increment Options (15%)

8. Social Media Presence/Hype (10%)

9. Competitors (12%)

Below is the score we have given for each parameter and overall rating of the ICO.

Please continue reading for detailed analysis. 

1. Necessity or Problem Statement (12%)

The video game industry is worth over a $100 billion today and is expected to grow at a rapid pace in the years to come. Also to be noted is that the gaming industry is shifting from the product to service, where, it is very important for on-going efforts of the game to be kept updated by players’ opinion.

Yumerium will give right incentive and decision-making process on this. Yumerium predicts that a growing segment of this huge revenue will be going to the “earn to play” market, which they aim to tap big time. At the same time, the current state of trade for the in-game items has many threats and problems. The hard-earned items, which have real intrinsic value for players, are traded on third-party sites. 

It attempts to solve all the problems present in the existing decentralized gaming platforms so that the online gaming platform can get boost up with more gamers and provide more profit for both game developers and players. This model works by incentivizing gamers to play by giving them tokens that can be spent like real money

Yumerium will help by providing decentralized payment gateway, a crowd-funded platform, and a gaming platform which will reward its players with reward in the form of YUM tokens. By aiming to solve all the existing problems which is high transactional charges or delay in the payment by providing the players a free, trustable blockchain based gaming platform, Yumerium gets a 8 on 10 in terms of their choice of the problem statement.

2. White paper (9%)

You can go through their whitepaper in the ‘Details’ tab.

The whitepaper has covered mostly all the required details including the project vision, market overview, problem statement, solution, business model and technology, but lacks in detailing information pertaining to the architecture. We would have liked to go through the technical architecture of the platform which is not available at all in the whitepaper. Overall the white paper is decently written with all the required information for a business user whereas a technical reader may find it less appealing. So we give them 7 out of 10 on this aspect.

3. Product Status (10%)

They do not have a prototype showcasing their offerings. Instead they have a section called STORE. The STORE showcases a few gaming arcades and the attached Yumerium against each of it. 

Yet with their store archade and their roadmaps being well defined, we give them 6.5 out of 10 for this.

4. Team (10%)

Yumerium has a global team of professionals spread across the US, South Korea, and Japan. To disrupt the gaming industry with the advent of blockchain and smart contract technology, they founded Subdream Labs that brought key talents from Subdream Studios and VR Plus who have extensive experiences in gaming industry, along with the experience in blockchain and smart contract technologies provided by Exa Labs.

Subdream Labs is jointly run by key members at Subdream Studios, a quality gaming studio that owns VR Plus, the first and biggest offline VR arcade in Korea. The studio has raised $2.4 million from marquee global investors: DeNA, HTC, Genesia Ventures, Cognitive Investment, Macro Ventures, and Bridge Link Capital.

VR Plus is the first and biggest VR arcade franchise in Korea with over 30 locations. VR Plus opened its doors in August 2016 in Gangnam, Korea with the intention of bringing VR arcades to the Asian market. They have been highly successful and continue to be successful after it was purchased by Subdream Studios.

Formerly known as Bitrucks, Exa Labs is a subsidiary of Exa Global, a Korean investment company. They are a cryptocurrency and blockchain company working on the development of the Hurbit cryptocurrency exchange. In February 2018, Subdream Studios traded partial ownership with Exa Labs to form a partnership and develop the blockchain side of Yumerium

Yumerium core team consists of 3 members (Jikhan Jung - the CEO, Francisco Martin – the CGO and Jaehyun Lee – the CSO), 8 advisors and 9 developers. The founders have a track record of leading the evolution of gaming business model which was the first game publisher in US that pioneered the new “free-to-play” model. They had achieved $40M annual revenue attracting 100,000+ monthly active players. They do possess experience in offline gaming business and cryptocurrency/blockchain as well.

The team is really strong and looks quite capable of developing the project as planned. We give them 8 on 10 for bringing on board relevant people with strong understanding of the challenges.

5. ICO Pricing (7%)

There are a few existing players in the market like Crowdwiz and Direct2Drive and a few like The Abyss are coming up. As gaming as an industry is highly lucrative, everyone will be interested to have a share of the pie. So it will be a challenging task to compete with the already available platforms and be the market leader. However, Yumerium has already collaborated with partners like Bridgelink, Exalabs, etc. 

The Yumerium’s token (YUM) ICO will be held in two stages - Presale and Crowdsale with a cap of 500 million USD. A total of 500 billion tokens will be in circulation, out of which 50% will be allocated for Token Sale, 20% will be put aside for Network Seeding, 20% will go to the founding team and advisors and 10% will be reserved for saved for reserve. Free bonus tokens received as part of the rewards can be utilized on the platform after launch. Considering this and the pricing, we give them 7 out of 10 in this aspect.

6. Business Model/Revenue Source (15%)

As far as the revenue sources are concerned, Yumerium will generate revenues through the following means. 

• Revenue by being a Driver for Acquisition & Engagement: Each game on the Yumerium platform will be allocated with the initial seeding Fund in YUM to attract new gamers to the game. Consequently, a gamer will earn YUM by playing, sharing, reviewing game. Gamers who have YUM will use YUM to pay for game money. Game developers can use YUM that they have to attract and engage with users by using marketing tools such as referrals bonus or airdrop/bounty campaign
• Revenue by acting as a Gaming Community with rewards: Yumerium is a gaming community where gamers share their experiences with other gamers which is a true form of viral marketing. Gamers will be properly compensated with YUM for such efforts. Game developers can set up rewards for the gamers with Yumerium as they want. Through this reward system, gamers will be more incentivized to participate in the community proactively
• Revenue through acting as a Crowdfunding platform: Yumerium will help indie game studios run crowdfunding campaign within Yumerium community, the place where the true game lovers are. Crowdfunding will be done through Yumerium and each campaign can receive earnable YUM that can be used for their marketing
• Revenue through acting as a decentralized payment gateway: With blockchain technology and smart contract, Yumerium will decentralize the payment system by removing middlemen from the transaction between gamers and game developers. Payment can be done instantly and transmitted to game developers and whoever has the right to take her share per smart contract with minimum transaction fee much lower than the fee conventional PGs charge and work globally without FX risk

By joining Yumerium, developers will reduce their marketing expenses and receive an extra income from referral payments made in other games on the platform. So the revenue stream will depend a lot on how they market and motivate the gamers and the developers in global stage. Even though there is a small element of risk here, given the potential the gaming industry has and even with a decent success rate, Yumerium can get a healthy revenue source. We give them 8.5 out of 10 for this aspect.

7. Token Value Increment Options (15%)

Team tokens are vested for 24 months, which means team members cannot use them during this period. This aspect, we feel will contribute to the growth of the YUM’s token value in the long run, which may be interesting to a number of investors already at the Token Sale stage.  Also, unlike the current corporation organization that needs to generate the profit from its business, and have shareholders to pay out its profit, tokens at blockchain will have its own value and ownership on the eco-system, so that not only investors have a way to run the protocol, it is more of the community who owns the token will drive the value and directions of the protocol. Also, we believe that the increase in number of users and the corresponding growth of the platform, will have a direct impact in the price of YUM tokens. So, token circulation among an ever-growing audience (in the ever-growing gaming industry) of the platform is a guarantee for increase of the YUM token value. 

We give them 7 out of 10 in this aspect.

8. Social Media Presence/Hype (10%)

A strong presence on Social Media usually results in a company’s popularity, though it cannot be the only factor that determines success. Here’s the numbers for Yumerium as on date

• Twitter – 6000+ followers
• Facebook – 4000+ followers
• Telegram – 22000+ followers
  

Yumerium as an ICO has been receiving the right amount of attention from the social media, with over 6000 Twitter followers and over 22000 Telegram members. Their evangelizing efforts in various social media platforms like Telegram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, are all intensive and is gathering the intended mindshare among ICO enthusiasts. 

They are spending a lot of effort on marketing and that has given them the intended attention to an extent. We give them 7 out of 10 in this aspect. 

9. Competitors (12%)

Yumerium is a project of Subdream Studios – a game-developing and VR company. This should give them a head-start on some of the competition. They seem to be well placed to do this, having been involved in the industry for a number of years with GalaNet, which ran the first free-to-play game in the US with game publisher gPotato. Yumerium will be launching their platform with four games— Dream Pets, Kingdom Watcher, Mega Overlord and Hell Dimension VR. 

Currently, the possible competition for Yumerium could come from the likes of Abyss, CrowdWiz, STEAM, Mirocana, Direct2Drive, Luckbox, GamersGate, GOG among others, which offer their own forums and channels for direct video game streaming, in addition to the game store they have. 

Needless to say, Yumerium is entering a competitive market, but it currently has the following advantages that can help them succeed in the long run.

• The advantage of being experienced in the field, having developed games for a number of years and having some games already built to be used on their platform
• The crowd-funding platform, which will help young developers to attract investments for their creation, and sponsors to participate in the creation of prospective games
• Yumerium acts as a Decentralized Payment Gateway, where the payment system will be completely decentralized, without any middlemen between the parties.
• Instant and secure transfer from player to developer

Overall, we give them 8 out of 10 in this aspect.

Based on our analysis we give a overall score of 75.15 out of 100 to Yumerium which is an decent rating.

One key question we have is what if a gaming user could use a bot to leave multiple positive comments or the user could leave reviews even though they have never played the game at all which could lead to reviews that are not 100% true. Though the Yumerium team has mentioned that they have an internal AI based scoring system to prevent any bots or fake activity like this, they have not been concrete in responses, we feel. 

Yumerium has an interesting idea and also plans to implement few key functionalities (like rewarding the gaming community), which is not currently offered by the leaders of the market. The ever growing video game industry could well contribute to the successful launch and further growth of this project. 

Based on our analysis, we feel that Yumerium has got it right with most of their key attributes. Given the strong team and its business model / revenue source, this ICO can be the one to watch out for.

We give it an “Above Average” rating and a long term investment option with moderate risk.