April 30th came and went, and Shadow now has new partners. The French administrative judge declared Jezby Ventures, which is the investment arm of HubiC, the winner of the two-company acquisition battle.
New Owners
Octave Klaba (in the center) runs Jezby Ventures and is the new president of Shadow. He is also the founder and president of OVH which is one of the largest cloud computing companies in the world. OVH offers web hosting, cloud file and media servers along with custom dedicated servers. Their services span across 4 continents with 30 datacenters.
The other company was Scaleway. They are also a big cloud platform offering cloud services from web hosting, dedicated servers, and private datacenters. They got beat out by Jezby Ventures and Shadow will now be under the control of HubiC.
Acquisition Concerns
If you know anything about HubiC,it was a cloud storage service that is now defunct, but the organization still exists. There were some reservations on whether this acquisition was a solid choice due to the failure of that service.
I personally don’t have any reservations because OVH is a solid service. With their resources extending as far as they do around the world, hopefully this acquisition should improve the Shadow experience and performance. But, according to an article on datacenterdynamics.com, it points out that gaming won’t be the focus in this acquisition.
“…they hope to use Blade, using its streaming technology as a core part of the new offering. Gaming would appear to no longer be a focus of the relaunched company, although the service will be kept online for a while.”
Hopefully, this isn’t the case. This might be bad news for the future of cloud gaming on the Shadow platform. We’ll have to see where this leads
Moving Forward
What does this mean for Shadow users? I’m going to speculate on this but my guess is that HubiC will increase prices for all Shadow tiers. I also don’t believe anyone will be “grandfathered” in at the current prices. I believe this because the reason Shadow was looking for a new investor was because they priced themselves too low to begin with. I expect HubiC to raise prices to ensure they get the best bang for the buck for the Shadow platform.
Shadow also had to quit their current agreement with their current server deal and sell off their server property. For certain US Shadow users, this means they will be migrating your PC account to HubiC servers, ours included. Our Shadow PC is located at the Chicago data center and will be moved.
Unfortunately, this also means all upper tier Shadow accounts will be converted back down to the Boost tier, at least for now. If you have any additional data higher than the base 256gb package, you will need to backup your data if you want to save it or else it will be deleted during the migration. This migration will happen on May 20th so make sure you prepare ahead of time.
Your account will go back to the $14.99 month-to-month plan and if you are a higher tier, will be credited the difference on your next month’s Shadow invoice. We’ll be doing benchmarking and input lag testing once things get migrated to test out the new equipment.
Your account will go back to the $14.99 month-to-month plan
In the meantime, Shadow will operate normally until HubiC initiates new significant business changes. It has only been a few days since the acquisition so time will tell to see what big changes await the Shadow platform. Hopefully these changes will be good news and not bad.
Overview
We’ll make sure to keep on top of this and keep you informed about this transition. Hit that subscribe button to get the latest news on Shadow and other cloud gaming services at the only place where you can battle in gaming heaven – Cloud Gaming Battle.
