Shadow renews its cloud computing offerings in Europe

Image credits: Romain Dillet/TechCrunch

Shadow, a French company that offers a gaming PC in the cloud (among other things), announced at a press conference that it is updating its Shadow PC offerings 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 previously implemented a similar change in the United States

The Shadows cloud computing service gives you access to a full computer in a data center near you. It works with 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 computing stuff.

Prior to today, Shadows subscription prices 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 basic 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-to-play games that aren’t too demanding, and if you want to play mostly at 1080p.

But if you’re looking for a high-end gaming PC in the cloud, Shadow has a premium consumer subscription called Power Upgrade. Prior to today, users were getting an AMD Epyc 7543P with 8 vCores, 16GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage. The Power Upgrade subscription cost 44.98 per month.

Now, Shadow is upping RAM from 16GB to 28GB and storage from 256GB to 512GB. This subscription now costs 49.98 per month. In both cases, Shadow basically charges a 10% markup on 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 a 9.99 activation fee for the first subscription. If you pay three months upfront, the company is waiving those setup fees. The reason Shadow is introducing these activation fees is because 42% of new subscribers are actually returning subscribers.

Image credits: Romain Dillet/TechCrunch

New features and new segments

Shadow customers can access their Shadow PC with one of the company’s apps on Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, etc. In addition to these apps, Shadow is rolling out 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 are a professional and would like to give a presentation at your client’s office in a controlled environment, the feature is not already active as 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 smoothly on the hard drive of your virtual machine. The feature is already live in beta versions of desktop apps.

Image credits: Shadow

While Shadow has primarily been used to play video games, the company wants to expand to other use cases. For example, the company currently has 30,000 GPUs spread across several data centers. Shadow plans to enable spot computing for GPU tasks with a starting price of $0.185 per hour.

Shadow also has subscription plans for enterprise customers with Shadow for Makers (freelancers and small businesses) and Shadow for Enterprise (large enterprise customers).

In the future, you could imagine universities using Shadow for exams in a controlled environment, public administrations handling sensitive data, etc. Shadow CEO Eric Sle even admitted that the company plans to create Shadow PC instances without an external GPU and that it would be an interesting game.