Mini-Shadow-News

International shadow news n°2 (07/11/2019)

Today’s international shadow news will be hosted by Luc, UK community manager and Emmanuel Freund, co-founder of shadow.

The subjects talked about today are:

  • The new offers (pricing, hardware, availability)
  • Storage
  • Update on the road map

Followed by the usual Q&A

I) The New offers

We have worked with many partners (Intel, Nvidia, OVH, etc…) to make shadow available and affordable for everyone, and only having a 30€/month offers wasn’t gonna cut it.

The first step was to make the current shadow hardware lower in price (Boost) at 12,99€/£/$ a month (for a yearly membership, +2€/£/$ for a monthly membership)

The second step was to make an offer with the latest components, cloud computing as a technology making you dream but would still be within reach. There, the Ultra offer was born, starting at 24€99 for a yearly membership (+5€ for a monthly one), with new memory, gpu, cpu…. Basically, everything new!

The last step was to show we had the technology to make something really badass, that we had the technology to make a computer so powerful that we shouldn’t be able to afford it because it’s so insane! We then created the Infinite offer starting at 39€99 for a yearly membership (+10€ for a monthly one), with an Rtx 6000 (equivalent to a Titan RTX), a CPU with 6 cores and 12 threads running at 4 Ghz and 32 Gb or RAM.

All 3 offers let you buy additional storage as you see fit!

The common goal of these 3 offers was to make shadow the way we wanted it from the beginning, a computer in the cloud that would fit everyone’s need. And that is why we launch a new UI that will allow you to play from everywhere with the comfort a gaming console with the power of a full gaming PC.

On another note, we also worked, and still are working on, the VR!

 

II) Storage

It was very difficult and costly to make and install a new computer for each new user we had so far. Thanks to our partnership, we are now able to scale that more efficiently, almost automatically.

We have worked a lot with our partner in Europe, OVH, and did a lot of R&D with them so that we would be able to launch these offers in Europe! We are now discussing with partners in the US to be able to launch these offers there.

The goal with all these partners is to put an end to the waiting for activation, for storage etc… That is what we are doing with the pre-orders in Europe and what we want to do with the US, which Is a priority.

 

 

Q: Will OVH be the only one to be deploying shadow data center?
A: No, we will still be doing our own data center, but the goal is to deploy wherever they have a data center! With their knowledge and our experience, it will make everything much faster and smooth for everyone!

Q: When will the new 1TB storage be available?
A: If you pre-ordered 1TB of additional storage with the new offers, you’ll be able to get it in November (no specific date yet) if you’re in the first 2000 customers to do it! Only in Europe, our partnerships are not ready yet in the US.

Q: When will the Netherlands become available?
A: First we focus to improve our services in the country we have, then we are looking at expanding to other countries. And the test we launched with the Netherlands with 1000 people went well, so very soon!

Q: Do you have a private tour of the data center in Amsterdam?
R: You can watch our last video for that! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZTwNrsyQ90

Q : The price for extra storage was 3£ for 1 TB, was is it much more expensive now ?
A: Because until last year we had limited extra storage to spare, so we used it for additional storage and we were able to sell it for 3£. We worked a lot with our partners to get a price as low as possible. The new price might look expensive compared to other storage offers (google, dropbox etc…), but their storage isn’t suitable for installing and running games on them! Ours are quite expensive to buy but way more efficient and suitable for gaming.

Q: What change will there be to the prices of the new offers after the 50000 pre-orders?
A: We still don’t know yet. We were able to negotiate those prices with our partners and we need to do it again!

Q: Any words about Apple TV development?
A:  According the devs in charge of it, it should be available before the end of November

 

 

III) The roadmap

We will have a small delay (around a month) on all the features because we have been developing our new streamer Ocapture 2.0 which is a big improvement compared to the previous version. But new features will be coming soon!

 

 

Q&A

 

Q: When will shadow be able to adjust gamma settings in Nvidia drivers?
A: We are working on adaptative resolution (not sure if it’s already in production yet) and that is the first step. We are working on it a lot, no date yet.

Q: When will battle for hardware starts?
A: It has officially started today (7th of November). The French guilds started first, the UK ones will start second, but we don’t have the exact date yet (in the coming days/weeks). If you want to ask more questions about it, you can reach Vincent/palindra#7949 on discord!

Q: Will the shadow app be optimized for chrome OS?
A: Not a priority right now. We are working to make sure Android Tv client, linux client etc. run perfectly, then we will work on that.

Q: Any news for when us lucky few who took the 250 invites from twitter (boost offer) a few days ago will be activated?
A: It will be before Christmas, but we don’t have an actual date yet.

Q: Will the Android app get the second screen feature?
A: I think it already has it. But if not, the devs are working on it and it will be available soon.

Q: And what about VR? Will it work with cloud computing?
A: Yes, it is already working on shadow. It’s unofficial but you can find some info online to see how it works.

Q: Is there a chance that all pre-orders will be deployed in February?
A: We haven’t reached the numbers of pre-orders that we won’t be able to activate in February (beyond which point we would be more like “ok, activation in march”). We are working on activating as many pre-orders as we can in February (or even before if possible), especially for our current customers.

Q: Why is there a new CEO?
A: So that it allows me [Emmanuel Freund] to focus on strategy, vison and development of shadow itself and the new CEO will run the company.

Q: When will Spain be added to your service?
A: We need to check with OVH what we can do and we’re doing as fast as possible while making the quality as good as possible before doing that.

Q: When do you start prioritizing current US customers?
A: If we want to succeed in the world, we need to make it in the US. Most of our partners are there. So, it is not a question of prioritizing or not the US. It is a big country and we need to make sure everything works perfectly so the new offers are also deployed to as many customers as possible. And we are fully working with our US partners to get the same quality, the same offers as in Europe. Yes, the US is a priority, the same as Europe, not less! That is why we have an office in the US, that we have Ryan and Adélina in community management and so many other talented persons working for us in the US.

Q: Are there any benchmarks yet about how fast the infinite offer is compared to the current offer?
A: Not really. We are doing some. But we would rather let testers of battle for hardware, journalists etc (neutral people) do those benchmarks and show everyone how it is.

Q: Why is the support team taking so long to answer these days?
A: because of the press conference on the 29th of October. Support team was overwhelmed with question and demands, much more than usual (around 10 times more than usual). It will get much better in terms of response time very soon.