How we created the best Cloud Gaming PC
At Shadow, we’ve taken great lengths to ensure that your cloud computer is super powerful, stable, and totally unique to you.
It’s not been an easy journey, but so far, we’ve had amazing results. After years of hard work, your Shadow is more awesome than ever, and gaming through it is an even more mind-blowing experience. But there’s still work to do — and we can get there quicker with a little help from you.
Shadow & Cloud Gaming is evolving
The Shadow that you currently know and love is not final. And that’s a good thing! We’re constantly changing, focusing on three main objectives — improving our performance, stability and the customisable aspects of our service — to ensure that we’re giving you the best cloud gaming experience possible. And we’d like to tell you everything that we’re doing.
Yep. Everything. From now on, we want to share our entire journey with you — from deep insights into our work to our short and long term goals. With that in mind, we’ll be publishing our Roadmap plus a series of articles over the coming months, covering every feature we’ve worked on so far, what we’re currently doing and what we hope to do in the future.
By being so transparent, you’ll be able to see exactly how we’re making your Shadow even better, and will also have the opportunity to provide vital feedback that’ll help us to create the cloud gaming experience you crave.
So, without further ado — let’s take a look at what we’ve achieved so far, and what we’re hoping to achieve next.
We’ve enhanced performance, image quality and mor
For those who are new to Shadow (welcome!), we’ve spent the past few years working on what we know gamers want. Perfect performance, gorgeous graphics… and for your parents to stop demanding your attention when you’re in the middle of an online battle (“this game doesn’t pause, mum!”).
We’re pleased to say that we’ve been able to help with the first two things — and more, besides. Our hardworking devs have spent hundreds of hours on improving Shadow, sprucing up your network management and audio and reducing latency and bandwidth requirements (which was no easy task). There’s still work to be done, but we’re definitely heading in the right direction.
We’ve made your Shadow ultra-accessible… and fast, too
With the dawn of 5G, Netflix and Amazon Prime, actually waiting for stuff is a thing of the past. This includes waiting for your account to boot up. Where once you might’ve had to twiddle your thumbs for a couple of hours to access your shiny new Shadow, you can now get online in a few minutes… or even almost instantly, with a rocket-fire internet connection.
It doesn’t matter where you are — or what device you’re using — either. From iPhones to tablets and even the biggest cinema screen in Europe, you can now access Shadow on almost any platform… without, again, having to compromise on that all-important performance. Can someone say “hell yeah?”.
Providing you with this awesome accessibility hasn’t been an easy road, however. Our devs had to completely overhaul Shadow’s architecture to create a new, unified client called Copperfield (which you can read all about here). Essentially, they made it so that all desktop applications you access Shadow on use common code and libraries — helping our devs to make changes and deliver unbeatable performance across all of your platforms. (Yep. They’re wizards.)
This, of course, is all behind the scenes stuff. You won’t be able to actually see any of these changes… but what you can see is our brand-new Quick Menu! This allows you to control and monitor your Shadow while in-game, without having to return to the main screen — something that’s sure to come in handy when you’re midway through an epic boss battle.
We’ve kept your data safe
Let’s face it. Local PCs are fickle. Failures happen, crashes occur, and, thanks to the blue screen of death, all of the progress you made on Dark Souls II can disappear in the blink of an eye (along with your sanity).
Fortunately, this is not the case with Shadow. We’ve made sure that your data can’t be lost in the event of a crash or accidental failure, thanks to a little something we call a “redundancy system”. Basically, this copies your data in real time to a recovery disk… so that no matter what happens, you won’t lose any precious progress. Praise be!
We’ve made it more unique
While we still have some way to go in making your Shadow customisable, we have developed remote USB functionality — so that you can access your cloud network on almost any USB-friendly hardware you desire. That can be anything from a keyboard and mouse to a USB toaster (because it’s never a bad time for toast).
We’ve also optimised Shadow for microphones — an extremely complex process that you can read all about here — so that you can chat to your mates in crystal clear quality while fighting n00bs through the cloud. Nice.
So… what’s next?
Though we’ve made a lot of improvements, we still have plenty of goals we want to achieve.
Firstly, we want to make sure that the amazing performance you experience through Shadow endures. By providing automatic updates to your cloud PC, and making constant tweaks and improvements to the build, we plan to make it so that from the moment you subscribe, you experience uncompromised gaming brilliance… forever.
That’s not all. We’re also working on making your Shadow available through as many connection types and hardware as possible, from the ultra-modern to the super oldschool. Currently, we’re looking at reducing bandwidth needs while making Shadow compatible with even older tech. Watch this space!
Your dream gaming rig is coming
At Shadow, we work around the clock to make sure that your cloud computer is always improving — making it more personal, powerful and performance-friendly for you, the players (below: our great team that helped build the roadmap).
We’ll be posting a lot more updates over the coming months, so keep checking back to find out what we’re up to, what’s coming next, and to provide any feedback you may have about your Shadow: and what you’d like it to include in the future. Together, we’ll create the world’s sexiest cloud computer. Because that’s what heroes do.
Originally published at https://shadow.tech.
