YAHAHA hosts Finland’s largest Global Game Jam Hybrid-Site with over 100 jammers creating on its platform

Over 80 games were created on the pioneering 3D creation platform

Community-focussed, user generated content platform YAHAHA can today present its wildly successful participation in 2023’s Global Game Jam (GGJ), which saw them host 110 people live at their site in game-development powerhouse Helsinki, making this the biggest hybrid-jam site in Finland over the course of 48 hours. A total of 80 games were created by talented jammers, collaborating both on-site and through their online community, with some games receiving as many as 34,000 plays till date. Always looking to service its community, the event was broadcast across YAHAHA’s Discord server, making this a truly collaborative and inclusive jam.

Jammer Filipe Borges, a graphic designer who joined in-person at the Helsinki site, said, ”This was amazing! I learned a lot at this event, and I connected and worked with some amazing people who I would never have met if not for events like this.”

Yahaha Studios, founded in 2020 by a pioneering group of Unity veterans, is on a mission to democratise 3D content creation. Committed to supporting its growing community of creators, YAHAHA offers them the tools they need to bring their visions to life in a 3D world. In line with this philosophy, the platform is proud to partner with GGJ to enable young game developers to take their first steps into the industry.

Pengfei Zhang, COO at Yahaha Studios, added, “It was a real pleasure to work with GGJ this year and to see so many game developers’ ideas blossom in YAHAHA. Being able to provide a physical, as well as online, space for jammers really created a sense of community amongst everyone, and we’re excited to continue our work with GGJ in the form of a long-term partnership to keep bringing YAHAHA to people around the world and pursue our mission to democratise 3D games content creation.”

GGJ is the world’s largest game-creation event, and this year’s event took place from January 30th – February 5th, with 40,000 jammers from around the globe creating a combined 7,600 games together. This year’s theme was revealed as ‘roots’, in a ceremony which included speakers from GGJ Ukraine and Code to Inspire, an organisation dedicated to bringing STEM education to women in Afghanistan.

GGJ Executive Director, Tim Cullings, said of the partnership with YAHAHA: “We were happy to work with YAHAHA on the 2023 Global Game Jam. GGJ is all about giving everyone the opportunity to make games and the YAHAHA platform enables anyone with an idea to get it working quickly with minimal training and experience. We saw over 100 games created with YAHAHA world-wide this year and I only expect that number to grow as the platform becomes more robust and people learn how it can be an extremely useful tool for game jams, prototyping, and building fully featured games. We look forward to a long-term partnership between GGJ and YAHAHA going forward and hope that our community will continue to use and support the platform after the jam.”

In the closing months of 2022, Yahaha Studios announced it had secured an investment of $40 million to further build upon the Early Alpha success of YAHAHA, a creator-focussed user-generated content social platform. Now with the added convenience of the new Asset Ovi platform, YAHAHA is currently open in Early Alpha, offering anyone the opportunity to be among the first to test the platform and share feedback as it continues to grow. This early community has an important role to play in how YAHAHA will evolve, influencing the shape the platform takes and building its digital world.