But that's really focused on long term commitments.

First they had an almost year-long waiting list. Now you have to pay a hefty commissioning fee.

For me that makes no sense as a cloud setup. The benefit of cloud is paying when you need it (like when I travel and didn't bring my PC) and not when I don't need it.

Stadia did offer that but because you had to pay for the games it also wasn't worthwhile.

I use plutosphere now for VR when I'm traveling and that's great and not too expensive. Still a bit buggy and slow to boot the machines though.

I think you misunderstand Shadow. It’s just a cloud PC. Any games you buy are unrelated to Shadow. You can stop paying whenever you want, and the games are still yours. You just reinstall them when you start up you Shadow subscription again. This is what I do. If you buy a physical gaming PC at any point, you just install your games into it, rather than Shadow.

And, there hasn’t been a waitlist for some time now. At least in California. I was up and running within 30 minutes of starting my subscription, and can cancel any time.

And, regardless of the exact implementation, the Shadow approach is infinitely more desirable to me than the complete lock in, and limited selection, of Stadia.

I know what Shadow PC is. But they now have an 'activation fee' that costs 1 month of use - $30 (currently waived but it will be imposed soon). That means if you just want to use it for 1 month (e.g. during a holiday) you will have to pay for 2 months. It applies every time you reactivate a paused account too!

And yes I know you use your own games.. But it's not suited for casual use for me. I use plutosphere instead. That's only intended for VR but that's all I use anyway :) Plutosphere is also a "PC in the cloud" but you pay $2 per hour and a $10 monthly fee if you want persistent storage. No sign-up fees though. But its pricing is pretty ideal for holidays, whereas Shadow PC is now completely unviable for that with the activation fee.

> It’s just a cloud PC

With the associated UX of manually logging in, handling disk space, waiting for installations and updates, etc. etc. etc.

The trade off is that the hundreds of games that I previously bought can be played, there’s no censorship or artificial restrictions in the game stores, and any games I buy in the future won’t be lost to the collapse of a single service, since I can just reinstall them on any other PC (cloud or not). Personally, that’s worth the minor inconvenience of an update screen. And, this is an implementation detail. Shadow could easily provide scheduled updates for Windows, and Steam/whatever popular store games.

> manually logging in

You should try shadow. You just open the Shadow app in whatever device, it boots, and you’re in. No login.

You do have to boot with a different device, first for VR with their Quest app (implementation detail of the Beta) or Virtual Desktop (required).

> You should try shadow. You just open the Shadow app in whatever device, it boots, and you’re in. No login.

You have to login to each and every store (Steam, Epic, Ubi, etc.) you want to play games with.

> there’s no censorship or artificial restrictions in the game stores

As of now. Some games' ToS already state you can't play them remotely, and technically Shadow would be in violation of that. It's enough for EA or whatever to threaten to sue them and they might implement restrictions.

I agree that the flexibility and continued ownership of the games is a massive bonus.

> you want to play games with.

Once, as you also need to do when booting up your a console for the first time.