Gaming on-the-go for most people means an
app on a
tablet or
smartphone, and there are of course the folks who will do their mobile gaming with a laptop. The catch is that gaming with high-end games requires some serious muscle of the sort that many laptops, tablets, and smartphones simply can’t muster. A new streaming gaming service is launching in California called Shadow, and it will come to more locations later (exactly when is unannounced at this time).
Shadow is like a “powerful Windows 10 PC” that allows you to surf the web, play games, and use high-end software on tablets and smartphones. Shadow can also turn basic laptops into workstation/gaming class machines. The games are streamed over the cloud via Shadow apps that are available for Windows, Mac, or Android (an iOS app is coming soon).
Anyone who has ever tried a streaming service knows that the quality of a streaming game can be very limited by your internet connection. Shadow promises to work on any web connection that is at least 15 Mb/s. The service promises to allow gamers to play all games on max settings with hardware equivalent to an NVIDIA GTX 1080 GPU, a Xeon CPU, 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.
You can also access the service with a hardware device called the Shadow Box. The Shadow Box supports 4K graphics, has HDMI out, DisplayPort, and USB ports. You would be wrong to think of the box as a PC; it has an AMD APU inside capable of 1080p at 144Hz or 4K at 60Hz. The service has a monthly fee with a month-to-month plan costing $49.95 per month, if you sign up for 3 months of service it drops to $39.95 per month.
The Shadow Box isn’t available just yet, and while we know you will be able to purchase or rent the Shadow box, pricing is unannounced. The Shadow gaming service is reportedly comparable to playing games on a $2,000 gaming PC according to the company. The company behind Shadow is called Blade and has been operating in France for a while now with about 15,000 subscribers reports VentureBeat. Shadow promises to let you install the “applications you want to play.” The service is going directly against GeForce Now and LiquidSky.
The service essentially gives you access to a remote computer and you can download games you already own from Steam and other digital game sellers. It appears that you can install any digital software on the remote machine and then use it on devices with the Shadow app installed. This means you can use software other than games as well, such as design software for business needs.
