Shadow is evolving: introducing our new offer

Thanks for the info!

Please make sure to include enough RAM (~24GB) or maybe offer a RAM upgrade similar to the current storage upgrade option 😶

Sry mates, but I have cancelled my subsricption. Even my old 980 Ti 6700k PC runs GTAO smoother than your setup. Without any doubt 30 €/month in the future for this crap is much too expensive.

Better to buy a new PC System.

I liked Shadow, even before mine got activated I started in the community, read lots of articles about it, got a fan of it. The Boost plan as for a casual gamer was a great solution to play games when I have time for it.

Improving Shadow is a good idea, saving from the bankruptcy is more than welcome, but saying that we will get new hardware for a forced new price (if you paid with an annual commitment of 12,99€), now you have to pay 29,99 € which is a 131% price increase, is not good.
You have a single offer, fine, it makes it simpler to deliver, but of course, this will cause you a big churn. I hope you not planning to finance this churn by the 131% price increment, and you think in a long-term customer-keeping strategy.
If this is for fire-fighting, maybe you will do too good work, and the whole project goes out.

People can get G*f*rc* N*w for 9,99€ without commitment. Of course, it’s not as flexible. But here it’s a huge price difference we get. There are other competitors. You may add new features for this huge 131% price increase, but no one has been asked about that if we need that.

Please respect your customers, who spread the word, keeping up with you and being here even if the upgrades are not happening, even if the new customer activations are delayed, and tried to convenience people not to cancel and wait because it worth the wait.

Please come up with a plan which suits your existing customers, and your new plan out, do the experiments, but with this change, you will lose even more.

It would be the best if we can keep our Shadow, without hardware upgrades, but we can switch to the new plan anytime.

Thanks for reading.

Hoping for the best.

There will be no upgrades. They will continue keeping you in the dark, and the price for the lacking hardware will just keep going up. 

You can finance a better pc for less money than their new ‘offer’. Leave, finance a machine and don’t look back. If you’re missing the cloud aspect, there is free software you can stream your home rig anywhere you like.
 
It’s taken too long, with too many broken promises for me to now continue with Shadow. It’s a shame, and I’m grateful I had boost, but you’ve blown any and all trust I had in you. 

-Ultra pre-order since end of 2019.. 

This is good, as it seems more viable, given that other cloud services charge by the hour. However, it is disappointing to hear that Shadow doesn’t seem to get the difference between pounds, euros, and dollars.

To be fair, and I think majority of the community would follow this…
The price-change is only correct, it was under-priced, which explains the massive interest and the delays and so on …

So nobody would have a problem with paying a bit extra here for the same service.

HOWEVER, the way it was handled, communicated, … has changed the look of Shadow entirely!
From great, fast and friendly support to rubbish communication and poor service reliability.

This could have been handled a lot better and now, I think you will just loose quite a bit of (potential) customers.

I'm still in doubt what to do with my boost.​

Sry, but I cannot follow you.

It was not “underpriced”. Subscription fee should not be higher (in five years), than an equivalent PC, but it is much more. 60 x 30€ = 1.800€ = round about 2.200 US$. (with only 256 GB SSD!)

BTW: 1.800 GBP is about 2.500 US$!

You will get a brand new Intel 11th Gen RTX 3070 32 GB Ram 1GB SSD PC and 5 years warranty with triple speed of Shadow Cloud for this amount of money. Even in this crazy Covid&Mining market.

Next Gen games may need 200 GB of Disc Space and more, so you have to rent additional disc space.

In the next days the biggest german discounter will offer an Intel Core i7-11700 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 1 TB PCIe-SSD 32 GB RAM 3.200 MHz PC System with 3 years full warranty for 1.499€!

This is 300 bucks less and many FPS more than Shadow with shared quadro GTX1080 fake GPU & creepy E5 Xeon CPU. You cannot even play on the Shadow Setup without permanent stable internet connection and an additional device.

And to be fair: Additional 750 GB Shadow Disc Storage is about 538€ more in five years…

In UK you may get an Intel i9 11th Gen RTX 3080 for the Shadow Cloud UK subscription fee with 1TB disc storage (3300 US$ in five years).

I do not even look two years into the future with Intel 12th Gen., RTX 4000 models and playing Next Gen games in 3440 x 1440p with Ultra settings, Raytracing and 100 FPS for this amount of money in a normalised PC components market.

Just call the Shadow subscription fee a “Crowdfunding”-donation, but not a customer friendly business model or even “a good offer”. It is like renting a 32 inch Full HD LED TV for 800€.

I do want to have this quote going as an important point to make. Will we be up-charged to the $29.99 even if we pre-ordered prior to the price increase June 25th or will we retain the $14.99 pre-order price and then jump up to $29.99? I clarification would be nice.

When it comes to concerns about hardware performance, I would assume since new contracts were written and other companies for server components are being used, I would find it unlikely that there won’t be some change in hardware relatively soon. Albeit whether or not that is necessarily better than the current Shadow Boost offering will need to be seen.

On the other hand, I still see the service as worth it with the price increase, however, for the audience of “non-constant” PC gamers. I have definitely moved away from gaming consistently due to time constraints, but being able to pay for a decent gaming PC when I want rather than paying for a behemoth PC that will sit around for the majority of time is still highly appealing. In the past, I would never have suggested Shadow to anyone who is consistently gaming anyway so this really should be a moot point for those that are trying to make it a daily driver. While a future may come where this is ubiquitous, it is not now and no one should think the quality that we have had so far was sustainable at $14.99 without debt accumulation. 

Nahh $14.99 was not a steal. The issue is this. . .I was an early adopter when the price was $25 a month and the service was great. The hardware was decent, but not spectacular. Fast forward a year,  and they lowered the price to $14.99 and they adjusted the service according to the price. They packed the servers with as many people as they could, which is reasonable. Server performance definitely took a hit as expected. With newer games being more demanding and the server performance mediocre at best, $14.99 is about the right price point. Now, again 256g storage is woefully inadequate so you are paying another $5 a month for additional storage.

Now to present day. . .$35 per month (30 plus extra storage) for hardware that is barely passable for modern gaming is way overpriced. This price demands 16G ram, 750TB storage, decent speed, and a minimum VGPU of a 2080 or higher. If this is what they are going to offer than I will pay, if not, than check please I’m out. 
 

PS I did not mention about server performance because that will not be an issue after the new price goes into effect as people are going to hit the eject button faster than a speeding bullet, including me!

As a former product/market manager that did this for a living, this is not rocket science. The cost of customer retention is incredibly lower than the cost of securing a new customer. Once a current customer bails on your service, you have a 2% chance of ever getting them back. It would have been a much more intelligent move to increase current customers $5 a month, raise the price for new customers and do what everyone else does and jack up the price annually at 10 times the inflation rate. That is the great American way! Slowly jack up the price until you reach an equilibrium between customer retention costs and additional new customers. Their current plan is just plain corporate suicide.

I look at it like this...for me the equivalent pc would cost ~$2K cad

I checked the prices ;)

Now even at ~$40/m cad it would take me +3yrs  to get $2k and after 3yr I would prob need a upgrade/replacement part so I would have to pay another 2k or so...with shadow<hopefully> they will upgrade the tech in 3yrs :P

Also my shadow is available anywhere on any device even a cheap android tablet...as long as I can get a good Internet conectition

That’s me done. Was fun whilst i lasted. Such a change is mostly going to alienate in the end. I expect it is going to be more harmful than helpful to the company overall.

Shadow as a whole is a great system and idea, but it isn’t ran the best and doesn’t look like it is going to change with the new owners who want to recoup their money.

Loved my shadow. However I can longer commit due to that ridiculous (over double) price hike, feels like a absolute kick in the teeth!  Gutted! I've had to cancel my subscription ☹

Sorry shadow, but you have messed up on this one. I appreciate you need to change to continue, but I feel there would had been better and more gentle ways to raise more fund's. 😭

Hahahahaha