After ambition and bankruptcy, the best PC streaming service has finally gotten its hardware upgrade

pcgamer.com:

Shadow has finally taken the lid off a streaming service upgrade first promised way back in 2019. But that was before the company sadly filed for bankruptcy and was subsequently reborn. We are now getting an RTX 3070 level PC in the cloud, however, but it's been a long time coming. And I certainly have concerns, not necessarily for the staying power of the company under new ownership, but for the value proposition it's now offering.

Shadow has been one of my favourite streaming services since I first got my hands on the cloud gaming PC back in 2018, and regularly used it when I travelled—when travel was still a thing—so I only had to take a wee ultrabook with me and still effectively had access to a pretty high-powered gaming laptop.  

It's unlike every other game streaming service, which essentially hide their systems from the end users and just give you the games to play. And then only the games it has licensed access to give you. Instead, Shadow is a whole persistent PC that's totally yours and lives purely in the cloud.

That means you can install whatever you want on it, run whatever you want on it, and access it from wherever you want.

It's an impressively powerful service, only really let down by the four Xeon cores the GPU was attached to, which did hold gaming performance back.

At least it was impressively powerful four years ago, when a GTX 1080-powered gaming rig was up there with the best systems around. One of the founding promises of Shadow as a long-term service, and the thing that made its high subscription price acceptable in the face of spending out on a local machine, was around future upgrades.

The idea ran that you'd pay your £27/month sub and you'd end up paying the equivalent price of a full-price