Shadowa French company that offers a gaming PC in the cloud (among other stuff), announced at a press conference that it was updating its offerings for Shadow PC in Europe. Essentially, the company is raising the prices of its two flagship subscription plans and slightly improving what you get for that price. The company had already rolled out a similar change in the US
Shadow’s cloud computing service gives you access to a full-fledged computer in a data center near you. It runs on Windows and you can install anything you want on it. For example, you can install games on Steam, Adobe Premiere Pro, or Microsoft Excel and use them for gaming, computer-intensive work, or general computer stuff.
Before today, Shadow’s subscription price started at €29.99 per month with 12GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, and the pro equivalent of an Nvidia GTX 1080 (a P5000 GPU).
The company’s new base subscription now starts at €32.99 with 512GB of storage instead of 256GB. The specs don’t change otherwise. This setup works well if you want to play free games that aren’t too demanding and if you mostly want to play at 1080p.
But if you’re looking for a high-end cloud gaming PC, Shadow offers a premium subscription for consumers called “Power Upgrade”. Before today, users would get an AMD Epyc 7543P with 8 vCores, 16 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage. The Power Upgrade subscription cost €44.98 per month.
Now Shadow is increasing the RAM from 16GB to 28GB and the storage from 256GB to 512GB. This subscription now costs €49.98 per month. Either way, Shadow is essentially applying a 10% increase to its subscription prices.
The good news is that existing subscribers won’t be forced to upgrade to the new plans. If they’re happy with 256GB of storage, they don’t have to do anything. Of course, if they want more storage, users can upgrade to the new plans in their account settings.
Shadow also introduces an activation fee of €9.99 when you first subscribe. If you pay three months in advance, the company waives this activation fee. The reason Shadow introduces this activation fee is that 42% of new subscribers are actually recurring subscribers.
Picture credits: Romain Dillet / TechCrunch
New features and new segments
Shadow customers can access their Shadow PC with any of the company’s apps on Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, etc. In addition to these applications, Shadow is launching the ability to connect to your virtual machine from a web browser on pc.shadow.tech. For example, this could be particularly useful if you’re a professional and want to give a presentation to your client’s office in a controlled environment – the feature isn’t already live at the time of this writing.
The company is also introducing the ability to drag and drop files and folders from your local computer to your Shadow virtual machine. These files will be transmitted over the Internet and will land transparently on your virtual machine’s hard drive. The feature is already available in beta versions of desktop apps.
Picture credits: Shadow
While Shadow has been primarily used for playing video games, the company wants to expand into other use cases. For example, the company currently has 30,000 GPUs spread across multiple data centers. Ghost plans to activate point calculation for GPU tasks with a starting price of $0.185 per hour.
Shadow also offers subscription plans for enterprise customers with Shade for creators (self-employed and small businesses) and Shade for business (large corporate clients).
In the future, one could imagine universities using Shadow for exams in a controlled environment, public administrations handling sensitive data, etc. Shadow CEO Eric Sele even admitted that the company is considering building Shadow PC instances without an external GPU — and that would be an interesting game.
