YOM Cloud Gaming Passes 10,000 Sessions in Walter Free Alpha

Nine times more sessions since June, and none of them paid

YOM is a Dutch-founded company building a cloud gaming network on gaming PCs owned by members of the public. It now has its first usage numbers worth discussing, though they need careful reading. The company logged 10,196 cloud gaming sessions on its decentralized GPU network in September 2026, up from 1,174 in June. COO Jeff Outlaw published the figures in an October 8 report on the network's first four months21. Month by month, sessions went from 2,153 in July to 5,943 in August before crossing five figures in September. Another 3,329 sessions came in the first four days of October21.

The main caveat is that every one of those sessions came through the free alpha of Walter.gg, YOM's browser-based consumer service. That means nobody paid for any of this usage21. The free library is also tiny: Counter-Strike 2, Warframe and Marvel Rivals, with players signing in through their own Steam accounts21. YOM has shown that the network can carry real traffic. It has not shown that anyone will pay for it.

Where the numbers disagree

The reporting does not line up on several key metrics, and the differences matter.

The first is audience size. Cloud Dosage, which has followed YOM since its token plans in March, said the company had not disclosed how many individual people used Walter21. But a YOM network update republished on KuCoin's news feed gives a September figure of 1,493 unique players in 113 countries, along with 6,471 "direct player" sessions26. If that figure is accurate, the average player ran roughly seven sessions in the month. That suggests a small, repeat-heavy group of early adopters, not broad uptake.

The second is hardware. In an October 8 snapshot, YOM counted 51 machines that had served sessions over the previous 30 days21. The September update gives 43 active nodes across 16 countries and 783 total streaming hours26. The two numbers cover different time windows, so they don't necessarily contradict each other. Either way, the active fleet is tiny next to the company's marketing. YOM's technology page still describes "thousands of nodes worldwide"1. The 28,041 PCs scanned for compatibility do not mean 28,041 machines online and serving games21.

The third, and most important, is latency. YOM's technology page advertises a global average below 12 milliseconds1, and earlier fundraising coverage repeated claims of under 10 milliseconds10. The October snapshot is more modest. For players within 50 km of a node, median one-way network latency is 15 ms; across all sessions, the median is 40.8 ms21. The September update gives 14.5 ms within 50 km, 21 ms within 500 km and a 30 ms global median26. These are network latency figures, not the full delay from pressing a button to seeing the result on screen21. The live data puts YOM's real performance well above the single-digit figures in its marketing. The honest pitch is that YOM can be fast if a node happens to be nearby.

The engine angle: Unreal first, Unity next

Under the consumer branding, YOM is a pixel-streaming business with deep roots in Unreal Engine. Its own description says it pixel-streams Unreal Engine 5 games from community-owned GPUs straight to a browser1. Its studio pitch offers a UE5 plugin, says Unity titles work through an integration, and targets less than four hours of studio onboarding at mainnet3. Partnership announcements from as far back as 2024 framed YOM's SDK around building and deploying photorealistic Unreal Engine 5 content49. An exchange explainer says a dedicated Unity SDK is on the roadmap2.

This matters for development technology. The case YOM makes to studios is about distribution, not graphics fidelity. Its headline case study, Martians vs Roughnecks, replaced a 7GB download with a 2MB streamed stub. YOM credits that change with a 1,316 percent rise in daily active users and 54 percent better retention3. That is one disclosed case reported by the vendor, so it supports the idea without proving it. Still, the idea is clear: if a game can be embedded behind a link, the download step that loses players before they ever start goes away. Walter's library of popular Steam titles is a different, consumer-facing test of whether the same network can carry well-known games.

AI as orchestration, not content

YOM's AI claims are about infrastructure, not gameplay. The company says a scheduler it calls HyperOrch, described as AI-driven and patent-pending, matches each session to a suitable GPU node using telemetry such as frame rate, 95th-percentile latency and thermals710. The network nodes report that data after every session, and the scheduler can raise or lower how many streams a node handles7. YOM's homepage now advertises "live AI per session" next to games and hourly container rental23.

I read this as a hedge. Discussion of AI in games usually means generated assets or smarter NPCs. YOM is presenting the same home and telecom GPUs as general real-time compute that can run models as well as games. The homepage contrasts $0.08 for a standard session of up to an hour with about $1.23 per hour for a data-center GPU reserved for peak demand23. With so little consumer revenue, that wider pitch looks like a backup business, not a side project.

Deals and tokens behind the network

YOM's funding comes from crypto as much as from games. The Avalanche Foundation led a $3 million strategic round, and the company has raised more than $4 million in total29. A February report also listed Outlier Ventures, CV Labs, Protein Capital, Blockraise VC and Simms International among its investors10. The $YOM token has a fixed supply of 750 million, a $0.10 launch price and a $75 million fully diluted valuation25. Its home chain has moved twice before Avalanche: from Solana to Peaq, then to Avalanche29. The March 25 token launch was postponed, and mainnet went live on June 521. One explainer said the delay was tied to EU MiCA crypto-regulation review29.

Telecom partnerships are the other major deal thread. YOM ran a UK trial with Cornerstone, StonesThro and Zadara. It reported 168 sessions over 20 days with no packet loss in the measured sessions, but frame delivery was uneven and needs fixing24. An exchange-published explainer describes a plan with a Tier-1 telecom operator covering an initial 200 cell towers, with a long-term target of 19,000 base stations2. Next to the 168-session trial, the 19,000 figure is an aspiration, not a forecast.

Why it matters against Xbox and GeForce NOW

The timing works in YOM's favor. Microsoft will add time limits to cloud gaming in Game Pass from November, citing rising costs11. Coverage reports a 15-hour monthly ceiling even for Ultimate members unless they pay for more18. This comes as Xbox clarified that its GTA VI streaming arrangement is neither exclusive nor available on PC1815. GeForce NOW, meanwhile, is chasing premium hardware: it added 25 games in October with RTX 5080-class performance for Ultimate members1416.

The big services are starting to ration compute and charge for top-end hardware. That is the cost problem YOM says spare home GPUs can solve. Its model makes the economics look attractive. Its plan to issue new node licenses only after existing machines reach a utilization threshold is a sensible response to the classic DePIN mistake of adding supply before demand21.

My view is that September's number is real progress and a weak test. Growing sessions roughly ninefold in three months on a free product with three popular games mainly shows that people will try free cloud gaming. What remains unproven is the business: paid Walter subscriptions with no launch date24, an active fleet of a few dozen machines, and latency that is close to rival services only when a node is nearby. YOM's own marketing has promised far more than this. The useful measures to watch are paid conversions and whether the active node count grows in step with sessions.