the 2025 gaming report backs decentralized cloud

It is always very satisfying to see data and hear conclusions that match with our core thesis, that cloud gaming is the future of gaming and that sound economics paired with new technology will be the key. The renowned Boston Consulting Group released their video game guidance report in December titled “How Platforms Are Colliding and Why This Will Spark the Next Era of Growth.” The data they found and conclusions they reached will look very familiar to those who have followed YOM and our roll out of decentralized GPU edge infrastructure.

cloud gaming is already “proven” by players (not just hyped by platforms)

First, cloud gaming is spreading. BCG reports that 60% of players surveyed have tried cloud gaming, with 8 out of 10 coming away with an overall positive experience. That matters because the historical blocker for cloud gaming has always been: “Does it feel good enough?”

Now with “yes” for the majority of people who have actually used it, the constraint shifts away from consumer acceptance toward distribution, unit economics, and reliable capacity.

And BCG adds a second nuance that’s even more important for infrastructure builders:

About 70% of cloud gamers still spend less than a quarter of their time playing from the cloud. However, when asked if economics are a major factor in their purchasing decisions in this current climate, 75% responded yes.

In other words, cloud gaming has crossed the “it works” threshold, but there’s still headroom to convert occasional use into default behavior. That conversion is where YOM wins.

three conclusions bullish on YOM

cloud gaming is already validated by players

BCG projects cloud gaming revenue to grow from $1.4B in 2025 to $18.3B by the end of 2030. This comes with a player user base growing from just 5M in this past year to 65M that same year.

These numbers matter less as “market sizing” and more as a signal of what’s coming operationally:

• More concurrent sessions
• More geographic coverage requirements
• More variability (spikes, launches, events)
• More pressure on cost per hour

Cloud gaming scales like a utility. If the model can’t scale supply elastically, which is the struggle that centralized data centers are up against, the economics will choke it.

Additionally, because the centralized system is not able to be very local to the player base, especially in emerging markets, the experiences will suffer and they will surrender that ground to our decentralized network.

gaming is moving toward hardware-agnostic, omniplatform access

BCG’s language mirrors ours regarding the cloud transition. They agree that we are moving to a hardware-agnostic era, where games become accessible across devices and the boundaries between “platforms” start to matter less than the ability to play instantly, anywhere. So the cloud becomes the layer that makes gaming portable across screens, sessions, and contexts, turning access into a service rather than a box you own.

They are also explicit about what this opens up for distribution:

Frictionless gameplay enables new acquisition funnels. If players can start a session without installing a game, publishers can convert interest directly into play from places like ads, emails, store pages, or community links, reducing the drop-off that normally happens between discovery and first gameplay.

Libraries and progress become truly portable. Players can carry their games and save states across devices (laptop, phone, tablet, low-spec PC), which increases play frequency and makes “play anywhere” a realistic default expectation rather than a premium feature.

Gaming shifts from units sold to hours played. When the game and the compute are effectively bundled as a cloud service, the business emphasis moves away from hardware cycles and one-time purchases toward engagement, retention, and ongoing usage.

For YOM, this is the core demand thesis: if the consumer expectation becomes “instant play, anywhere,” then the winning infrastructure will be the one that can place high-performance compute close to users, globally, at scale, and do so with a materially better cost structure than centralized hyperscaler-only delivery. This is exactly what our network is built to deliver.

spend behavior is bifurcating: price pressure + premium demand

BCG’s monetization section is a blunt read on the consumer environment:

More than 75% of survey respondents say that game prices will impact their purchase choices, reflecting clear price sensitivity. At the same time, about 65% of gamers report using tactics to save money, such as waiting for discounts. The outcome is a split market: approximately 45% of gamers are “serious fans” who are willing to buy even at higher prices, while roughly 23% are neutral, and about 30% say their purchasing will fall if prices rise.

This is the infrastructure wedge.

When gamers are price-sensitive, platforms can’t simply raise prices to cover higher compute costs. But premium segments still demand premium experience.

So the industry has to do something harder: Deliver premium experience at a better cost curve.

That’s exactly where our decentralized supply networks become structurally relevant.

what this means for YOM: the bottleneck is shifting from demand to supply

BCG puts cloud gaming revenue at $18.3 billion by 2030, which moves YOM’s real constraint from finding players to finding GPUs.

BCG’s report is effectively saying:

Demand is here. The experience is good enough. The market is growing fast.

Now the question becomes: can the industry produce enough low-latency GPU capacity, in enough places, at low enough cost, to make cloud gaming feel effortless and priced correctly?

This is where YOM’s network model can be positioned as a direct answer to the constraints BCG highlights:

• Network technology is fully validated and running via distributed home gaming rigs
• Cost to the developer is dramatically reduced: a Standard session of up to an hour costs $0.08, against about $1.23 for the same hour on a data-centre GPU reserved for the peak
• The game experience is high quality, regarded as ‘native feeling’
• Scaling is not gated by large OpEx expenses, meaning growth is enabled freely

the takeaway

BCG’s conclusions are bullish for YOM for one reason:

They describe a world where cloud gaming demand is rising quickly, the consumer experience is already “good enough,” and spending trends force the industry to compete on cost-per-hour, without sacrificing quality.

That is the exact environment where a decentralized, elastic, edge-first compute network can become not just viable, but necessary.

Ready to be part of this revolution? Become a node operator or contact us to learn more about publishing your games on YOM.

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