Blade / Shadow

Nobody can quite work out how to tackle the game streaming conundrum. With issues of hardware prowess, latency, and meagre software selection to deal with, OnLive - and most other challengers - have fallen by the wayside. Step forward little-known French startup Blade. At a glance, the basic pitch appears to be cut from similar cloth – a cloud-based service, seemingly tailor-made for delivering games to an audience ready to leave consoles and physical purchases behind. Except Shadow isn't actually a gaming provider at all – it's an entire high-end PC, streamed from the cloud.

"It's exactly like a computer – you put your username and password, there's two-factor authentication on your phone, and you arrive on a normal Windows computer," Blade co-founder and CEO Emmanuel Freund explains. "You're free to use it as a normal computer – alter settings, you can see the graphics card specs, everything. You can even load and unload drivers – it's your own computer, you can do exactly as you'd like to do, Photoshop, high-end games, everything."


Available on a subscription basis, with prices starting at £26.95 a month for a 12-month contract, Shadow offers a system configuration boasting a GTX 1080 GPU, an eight thread Intel Xeon 2.1GHz CPU, 12GB RAM, and 256GB of storage at hybrid drive speeds. More storage can be added, for an additional fee. That's a good enough system spec to run most games and software on reasonably high settings, and Blade promises regular upgrades to keep the ethereal machines up to scratch.

Shadow boxing

Blade's most striking product is the Shadow Box, a polyhedral gadget with cool glowing sublights, four USB ports, headphone and microphone jacks, and two display ports. It looks like the kind of micro-build PC or Steam Machine you might put together for your living room TV. The twist is, according to Freund, there's "almost nothing inside." It's a delivery mechanism for the virtualised machine that lives online.

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Unlike its predecessors in streaming computing, Shadow isn't trying to sell you on a new gaming eco-system or storefront either – you'll still buy your games privately, through Steam, GOG.com, Uplay or any other digital retailer.

Is this the future of PC gaming - and PCs in general? Blade / Shadow


"That was super important for us, to make sure that we don't put anything other than the computer," Freund says. "People are free to do whatever they like. You can plug in controllers or keyboards or printers, and you even have a LAN port so you can have the same networking you'd have on a normal computer. The goal is for people to install exactly the same way they would, have the same experience they would have, on a standalone computer. We're not in the business of selling games."

Nevertheless, appealing to gamers is a core goal for Shadow, as a showcase for Blade's technology as much as anything. "Games were the first thing that was interesting, our first target," Freund says. "It's where if we can say 'look, games are working, you can run FPS games without latency', then anything else is possible."

It delivers, too. I played the likes of Rise of the Tomb Raider, The Witcher III, and Black Mesa, all remotely installed from my personal Steam account and streamed from Blade's main data centre in France, with zero detectable lag, all in full HD. I switched to the phone app, synced up a controller through Bluetooth, and continued playing, the experience surprisingly stable even on a 4G connection. Shadow also supports 4K gaming, on compatible screens.

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Yet while the Shadow Box fills an almost psychological need to have a physical desktop PC, Shadow really exists as a service, your virtual PC accessible on any device with a screen and an internet connection.


Given Shadow lives on the cloud, access can be delivered via apps for other platforms. It's already available for Android, covering phones, tablets, and smart TVs, and Blade provides desktop apps for Mac and Windows. With the only requirement being an internet connection, that allows for some pretty exciting possibilities – running a full Windows 10 desktop on Mac without the local hardware demands of Bootcamp, or Inception-like scenarios where you can run a high-spec PC on a low-end laptop, playing games and running software you could never run on them normally.

"That was one of our first demonstrations, when we were raising money!" Freund recalls. "We had two laptop computers, very low end. Exactly the same, but on one we put our system, and on the other everything was local. We asked people to use them, just web browsing to start with, and guess which one was the cloud one. They thought the local machine was on the cloud, because it was running slower. After that, we had them load Photoshop and the local one wasn't able to do it at all, and the cloud one was doing it in seconds. The same with GTA V, the local couldn't use it at all."

As impressive as Shadow is, it began life as something even more ambitious – a streamed, high-end-low-cost smartphone. "I'd been working on a smartphone before with my cousin," Freund tells me. "We were [planning on] building in China and were doing the UI and everything, [and it struck us] that it doesn't make sense to put more and more things in – a CPU, tonnes of memory, a super-big battery, camera, everything – keep it super slim, and somehow keep the cost down."

The idea came of shifting the grunt work of a smartphone to the cloud but delivering the same reliable, high powered experience of a Samsung or iPhone X over the air. It wasn't to be though – the simple act of going on a subway or losing signal would mean people's phones would stop working.

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"We thought 'Phones? Maybe that's the next problem. Let's start with computers'," Freund recalls. "We started with a gaming computer, to show we can deliver a super high performance. A lot of desktop computer users don't even have WiFi because it sucks for games, so they'll connect directly with an internet cable, to have a great connection. So [we thought] let's focus on people who have a super-good connection just to show that to those people we can deliver a high end computer."

Shady behaviour

The main concerns potential users may have will likely be over privacy and the security of their data, questions Freund and his team has already anticipated.

"The first questions when we started were about security," he says. "Like, 'are you looking at what we're doing, particularly at 2am in the morning?', or 'can your data centres be cracked by Ukrainian hackers and my nudes will be on the internet the next morning?', or are the FBI or NSA allows to take my data and see what I'm doing?' – all things like that. We really had to reassure people that their data is their own. We have a data centre in the US now, and we make very, very sure that no data transfers between the US and Europe, to make sure that US law that will not affect data in Europe, for example."

Blade is also taking a hands-off approach to user behaviour. When I raise the issue of users potentially using their Shadow virtual machines to download illegally, and whether Blade might be liable, Freund offers a relaxed response.

Blade / Shadow


"First, downloading illegally is wrong, people should not do that. But we don't care, at all," he says. "That's their data. We're closer to being an ISP. If we got a letter from a government or a judge saying 'this person is downloading illegally, you need to tell them to stop', we'll tell them to stop. We'll always apply legal limits of each country. But more importantly, we don't own the data of the user. Pirate Bay, for instance, exists solely for downloading illegally. We're offering a computer. It's not the same thing, and the majority of people are doing core computer tasks."



"We're working on replacing computers – we want to be a Google sized company, to change the world," he continues. "So far, [in France] people play along. We haven't had to add policies to regulate behaviour. We're looking at the GPU load, the download/upload ratio, and if we see the load at any given data centre is too high then we start to look at heavy users to see if anyone is downloading 24/7, but for now it's not a problem."

Shadow still has some teething issues though. Using the phone app is best suited to streaming gameplay – it doesn't turn the virtual Windows 10 into a touchscreen compatible environment, making navigation tricky. There's also no browser-based access yet, so if you do want to access your Shadow on another machine, you'll need to download the app – not ideal for quick access when travelling, for instance. There's no compatibility with VR headsets yet either, although in large part due to the same restrictions that are preventing VR headsets from going cordless just yet – the monumental amounts of data that need to be transferred. As an early user, I also had to draw on years-neglected French language skills to struggle through set up, despite selecting English for language and the UK for location. Blade assures me this will be corrected for its wider UK rollout, though.

Will Shadow replace my regular computer? Not just yet, but it's run everything I've installed on it so far, and the convenience factor is enticing, so I can see the day when it potentially could. For Freund, that's the end goal. "It's a thousand times better than a computer. This is the proof that computers are obsolete now."