BEFORE THE STORM

A year that felt like a room with the lights still on

Not a highlight reel. A record of what held.

I do not remember 2025 as a timeline. I remember it as a feeling.
And I know this comes later. Still, it is the image that explains the whole year.

By October, we rented a house on purpose. Bags by the door. Laptops open before anyone fully sat down. Cameras charging on the floor. A stream going live in one room while, down the hall, someone is already mapping the next push. Numbers get checked without ceremony. A laugh breaks too loud because everyone’s been carrying the week like it weighs something.

In that house, something shifted. We did not have to explain ourselves. We could just work. Together, in the same air, where momentum stops being a concept and starts being a sound.

Discord stayed open even when we were in the same space. Not habit. Identity. Tempest lives online, but it was never meant to stay there.

And behind the scenes, it was never just “creators.” It was the spine of the org. Mods holding the line. Producers keeping the schedule alive. Editors turning chaos into output. Community leads translating hype into direction.

2025 was the year Tempest stopped feeling like a tag and started feeling like a place.
Not a perfect place, far from it. But a real one.

How We Grew Without Losing Each Other

There is a version of growth that feels like screaming into the void. We did not want that.

We wanted the kind you can repeat. The kind that survives a bad week and still wakes up with a plan. The kind that does not depend on one viral moment or one heroic person holding everything on their back.

And yes, there were bad weeks. Nights where things broke mid-stream. Nights where sleep was a rumor. Nights where we had to patch the operation while it was still running.

That is what 2025 became for us. Less “big moment,” more rhythm.

AVAX Gaming: The Door We Held Open

January was our first proof of rhythm.

We stepped into a monthly collaboration cadence tied to AVAX Gaming initiatives and drove 1,000 users across titles like My Pet Hooligan, Maplestory, Spellborne, Paradise Tycoon, Rumble Royale, Off the Grid, and others. The number matters, but what mattered more was the door it opened.

Internally, we marked it as the first Brazilian guild consistently funneling users into the Gaming on AVAX Discord. That kind of “first” does not feel loud in the moment. It feels heavy later, when you realize the next Brazilian team walks in with less friction because someone already proved the room exists.

Arbitrum Gaming 3.0: Receipts, Not Rhetoric

April is where we stopped “posting” and started running a system.

Arbitrum Gaming 3.0 became a four milestone run across roughly four months. Not a single push. A training arc. Align creators, ship output, report honestly, then do it again before the afterglow fades.
Internally, we tracked 5,000 users driven across a spread of titles and communities. Not one game, not one audience. A messy ecosystem that demanded real coordination. And it was not “post and pray.” It was work you could feel in the calendar. 20 coordinated streams. Six long-form YouTube educational videos. About 30 Twitter posts through micro-creators. Game nights and interactive sessions that turned attention into participation.

We kept receipts because we respect reality.

• Milestone 1: YouTube 33K views and 395K impressions. Twitch 127K views. Twitter 90K views and 1.1M impressions.

• Milestone 2: YouTube 44K views and 510K impressions. Twitch 11K views. Twitter 44K views and 480K impressions.

The numbers were strong, but what I remember is the discipline. The feeling that the machine could breathe on its own.

Wildcard x Thousand: The Night the Ceiling Moved

May gave us one of those nights you do not forget.

During the official Thousand x Tempest livestream for Wildcard, we hit an internal all-time high. 88.5K USD collected in credits, later converted into WC tokens. I am not writing that as a flex. I am writing it because of what it felt like. The ceiling moving. Proof arriving in real time, with the partner watching and the ecosystem awake.

You do not forget that kind of proof. It stays in the body.

Elumia via Triumph: The Kind of Partnership That Feels Human

Later in the year, we ran the Elumia campaign through Triumph. Some partnerships do not feel like promo. They feel like shared intent.

It lived in the sweet spot Tempest cares about. Not just attention, but movement. Players had a reason to show up, a reason to stay, and a community layer that did not feel like an afterthought.

Launch Season

When everything gets loud, the job is to stay calm.

Launch days do not reward whoever yells the loudest. They reward whoever stays coherent while attention splinters and everyone’s nervous.

We treated launches like operations. Pacing. Onboarding. Creator alignment. Community stability. The work people do not romanticize until it saves them.

Ragnarok Libre (DELABS): One Month, Full Focus

August was one month of controlled aggression, measured in outcomes.

Internal reporting attributes 3,000 users, about 20K in spend, collaboration across multiple Web3 and Web2 communities, and three guilds hitting the top of the leaderboard. Then the media layer hit. YouTube 109K views and 1.2M impressions. Twitch 520K views. Twitter 35K views and 410K impressions.

The point was not to be loud. It was to be useful, fast, and consistent.

ROHAN 2: What Happens After the Hype

ROHAN 2 reinforced the same lesson launches always teach. The date is never the whole story. The date is just when pressure becomes visible. The real work starts after. The moment excitement turns into routine, and the community needs orientation more than hype.

Ragnarok Landverse America: A Statement Under the Lights

Landverse America was different. It was not just a launch. It was a statement.

It came with a massive launch party, and it was not massive in a superficial way. It was massive because it was real. People in a room. Conversations that do not happen on the timeline. Introductions that turn into plans.

We wrote an article about that night because we did not want it to disappear into the feed. Some moments deserve to be documented like evidence, not treated like something that expires.

Operationally, it became the biggest Tempest project to date. The kind of effort that pulls every part of the machine into the light at once. Creators moving in sync. Coverage running on schedule. Logistics handled before they become fires. Partners taken care of. Culture protected while the crowd grows.

And the launch itself felt like a season starter. The kind that does not end after the first wave. It asks for retention. It asks for consistency. It asks you to keep standards intact when attention spikes, when sentiment whiplashes, when everyone suddenly has an opinion and half of them are loud enough to sound like truth.

That is the line, every time. Guilds either become infrastructure, or they dissolve into noise.

Competitive Operations

Illuvium Leviathan: Where Execution Shows

September was pressure, in public.

The 13K Illuvium Leviathan tournament was Tempest carrying execution end to end. Logistics. Pacing. Community handling when things get tense. The kind of work that looks effortless only when it is done right.
That month mattered because it proved something simple. We do not just play inside ecosystems. We can help produce them.

Tempest House

Where creators stopped being profile pictures.

This is the house I opened with. The point in the year where the internet became physical, and everything got sharper.

Tempest House was a rented house during BGS in October. We reunited our creators to work side by side, stream, coordinate, and move as one. No filters. No “we’ll catch up later.” No pretending. The biggest change was compression. Decisions that would have taken days in DMs got made in minutes. Problems got solved before they became fires. The operation stopped being theoretical.
And quietly, it changed our external reality. Partners could finally see us. Deals came not from promises, but from proximity and proof. Tempest House made us legible to people who needed to trust the machine behind the name.

That house held more than content. It held pressure. It held trust. It held the kind of focus you only get when you’re tired and still choose to keep going.

What We Kept

2025 gave us proof, yes. But it also gave us something softer, and harder to earn.

Closeness. The kind you only get when people are tired and still choose to show up. The kind of trust you cannot manufacture online, because it is built in the quiet minutes after a stream ends, when nobody is performing and the work still gets done.

Tempest gave us a home base that turned creators into a unit, and that unit into leverage. Not the loud kind. The real kind. The kind that opens doors because partners can feel there is an operation behind the name.

And it reminded us where Tempest is strongest. When it stays a little dangerous. Warm, but not comfortable. Intimate, but not soft. Focused enough to keep the lights on long after other people log off.

After the Storm

2025 was not a highlight reel. It was a year of becoming.

A house that grounded us. Launches that tested us. Campaigns that proved we can move players. A tournament that put our execution on trial. And more than once, we found ourselves not watching the industry from the outside, but standing closer to the work, closer to the decisions, closer to the people who build.

If you were with us this year, you felt it. Not as one viral clip, but as something steadier. Tempest starting to feel inevitable.

To the creators who carried nights that did not look glamorous.
To the people who moderated, coordinated, edited, hosted, explained, recruited, and kept the standard from slipping.
And to everyone who chose to build with us instead of just watching.

Thank you.

2026 does not need more noise.
It needs more Tempest.