My personal experience with Shadow Cloud Gaming - "Have your Kraken & drink it too!"

I just wanted to share my experience with Shadow.Tech Cloud Gaming, after I tried it out on recommendation from BoredGamerUK. Thanks Bored! I stand to gain nothing out of you trying the service or not, I really couldn't care - but I'm hoping this may be helpful for some people who may be looking at Star Citizen and nervous about whether their PC will run it or not. In that case you may like to have the option to access a cloud-gaming rig that you can play Star Citizen on. Basically helping make Star Citizen more accessible.

Those of you who may prefer to invest more into Star Citizen Game Development (like me), or if you're generally interested in Cloud Gaming tech (like me), may find this interesting as to how it applies to accessing and playing Star Citizen (a game commonly associated with requiring pretty kick ass hardware in order to run).

Earlier this year while abroad overseas, I was tossing up whether to buy another full new gaming PC or wait until my visa was approved for a longer stay first (since I already had one kick ass beast back in my home country, but I'm abroad internationally quite a lot nowadays). I ordered and tried out Dell Alienware top of their line laptops and was not impressed with the fan noise or performance compared to a kick-ass PC and ended up returning them.

It was about this time that BoredGamerUK did a video recommending a service called Shadow for Cloud Gaming...

I thought I'd give it a go and since then I've been able to play Star Citizen from any device I want (laptop, tablet you name it), with full pass-through for HOTAS, on the go, whenever / wherever I want that I have a decent internet connection, and without having to compromise from PC gaming performance by buying a "gaming laptop" (which are usually too noisy, heavy and compromised in performance for my liking anyway).

The service is still relatively new and hasn't been without its hiccups, but they're constantly improving the service and updates have been regular. They're also trying to revolutionize cloud gaming and as you might have guessed from my backing of Star Citizen, I like getting behind companies that are pushing for new boundaries in their field; one of the reasons I like getting behind Star Citizen is because they're pushing the boundaries of what can be achieved in an open world game and setting new standards for game development all the time.

I'm not saying Shadow is perfect, there have been some issues particularly in the early days with USB over IP passthrough for HOTAS which is vital for Star Citizen, but it's working very well at the moment and hence why I thought there may be those of you out there who would appreciate reading from someone who has had some experience with Shadow and dealing with their company, support team, and the community backing it. They have a very active discord and support normally responds to tickets via email within a day or so.

If you have had issues getting Star Citizen to run on your PC/Laptop and you're wondering whether to continue backing the project when you can't play it properly, or if you're just lucky enough to be in a region supported by Shadow and feel like giving it a go, then why not try it out and see for yourself.

A couple of useful tidbits of info:- Ping from the Shadow data centers is usually very good <5ms for local region servers. Download speed of 1Gbps and upload speed of 100Mbps is decent. Access from any device with a good internet connection. If you use the code BREWBEARD then you get a discount with shadow.

Here's hoping your experience with Cloud Gaming is as positive as mine has been if you decide to give it a go! - And even if it makes Star Citizen more accessible for one extra person, then this post was worthwhile.