In a normal year, Blade’s Shadow cloud-gaming service might seem superfluous: Do you really need to stream games to your PC as components quickly drop in price? But that was before today’s cryptocurrency miners began snapping up GPUs left and right. Now, the Shadow service is something of an option for leasing a pricey GPU, rather than buying one. In our hands-on time with the service, it works acceptably—though a bit of lag, bugs, and an obtuse setup process muddy the experience.
The Shadow service takes a page from its spiritual ancestor, OnLive, the cloud-gaming service that disappeared in 2012, was reborn in 2014, and then sold to Sony. Blade provides a powerful virtual PC, currently housed at or near the company’s Palo Alto, Calif. headquarters. You, the user, are asked to pay $49.95 per month ($34.95 per month if you sign up for a year) to use it—and for now, it’s limited to Californians.
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