Remote Control

How a French startup is revolutionising cloud gaming by giving every user their own remote PC.

Blade’s co-founder and CEO, Emmanuel Freund, gets right to the point. “Even for me, cloud computing – cloud gaming, whatever – has been shitty,” he says. “It hasn’t been working, let’s be clear; if it was working then everybody would have cloud-gaming stuff.”

Freund’s company has been running its cloud-computing service, Shadow, in its native France since the middle of 2016. Now, ahead of the service’s rollout in the UK and US, Blade faces the challenge of differentiating Shadow from a legacy of similar products that, at best, have achieved limited success. Like OnLive or PlayStation Now, Shadow provides users with access to games from any device with a screen and an internet connection. Unlike those services, however, Shadow’s offering isn’t limited to a provider approved catalogue of games. Instead, Shadow provides remote access to a powerful PC with a top end Nvidia GPU, 12GB of RAM, 256GB of storage and a Windows 10 installation – and that’s it. Users are free to do whatever they want with their Shadow PC from that point, including installing games from Steam or other download services, browsing the Internet, working – anything and everything a PC can be used for, really. Each user is guaranteed access to their own machine whenever they want it.

“The biggest threat we had to face was the failure of other services.” Freund says. “That’s why everyone had a shitty image of the cloud – even me. I mean, the cloud? Come on. I use Spotify, I use Netflix, I use whatever, but for my PC? The cloud? No. That’s only because they tried to sell a service that was not working fully.” Freund is keen to stress – and to demonstrate – that Shadow is different.