Cloud gaming provider Shadow lowers price to $11.99 a month

Cloud gaming service Shadow, from the French startup Blade, is drastically lowering its price in a bid to compete with a new wave of platforms from Google and Nvidia. Now, Shadow’s service, which offers a full PC in the cloud with no restrictions on what you can download, will cost as low as $11. 99 a month for the platform’s “Boost” tier. That gets you a cloud PC powered by a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 graphics card, a quad-core 3.

4 GHz processor, 12GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage. Prior to today’s announcement, Shadow was only available for $25 a month if you purchased an annual plan or $34. 95 a month if you purchased the subscription monthly. Shadow began briefly running a $12.

99 a month promotion for the annual plan starting last fall, but it’s since discontinued the offering in the run up to today’s announcement. In addition to the $11. 99 plan, Shadow is now offering a $24. 99 a month “Ultra” plan that ups the GPU to an RTX 2080 card, with a slight boost to the processor, 4GB more RAM, and twice the storage.

And for the $39. 99 a month “Infinite” plan, Shadow will give you a remote PC with a Titan RTX card coupled with a six-core 4 GHz processor, 32GB of RAM, and 1TB of storage. The price drop should help Shadow stay competitive with offerings from Google Stadia and Nvidia’s newly public GeForce Now service.

“While Stadia Pro currently costs $10 a month, Google doesn’t actually offer subscribers access to a remote PC.”

Instead, you have to buy games that only work on Stadia and access them through a special web portal, a mobile app that functions only on certain Android phones, or through a Chromecast Ultra. Nvidia’s GeForce Now is more similar to Shadow in design, in that Nvidia lets you use your existing library of Steam games via a Mac, PC, and Linux app. But Shadow goes one step further than Nvidia by letting you access a full Windows 10 machine in the cloud, instead of just launching games via Steam. From there, you can install whatever software you like using Shadow.