"The next gaming console will be a cloud gaming console"

Tech company Shadow wants to pull off the ultimate gamer magic trick, giving you all the power of a high-end gaming PC without the hardware. In an interview with GamesRadar+, the president and CEO of the company Emmanuel Freund explained why you should bet on the the next generation of consoles being powered by the cloud. 

"The future of gaming, and the future of humanity of course, is the cloud," he says. "The next gaming console will be a cloud gaming console."

Freund also believes that the cloud can make gaming accessible to more people. 

"Normally video games are the cheapest entertainment ever. You’re paying 50 bucks to play a game for 100 hours or 1000 hours," he explains. "So it’s the cheapest entertainment ever but to get access to this entertainment you need to buy a $400 console or a $1000 - or even more - PC. So it’s actually diminishes by a lot the kind of people who can access this kind of entertainment."

In the interview above, he also explains the perks for the people who make games, the developers who have to worry about different consoles, PC specs and online gameplay needs. 

"It enables also a new way of development. So you can imagine your big servers and your players are already there. You can add one million players suddenly and you don’t need to synchronize everything. You just need to send the results, because everything is happening there. And so suddenly you reduce the time of development by one third."

Shadow also just announced Hive -  a new platform for its growing global community of 50,000 members - which will allow users to "share their gaming experiences in real-time, allowing friends to join in each other’s games, live chat, track another’s progress or offer advice based on one’s gaming position in real-time." 

What games would make cloud gaming worthwhile? Here are the 25 best PC games that are available now.

Rachel Weber
Managing Editor, US

Rachel Weber is the US Managing Editor of GamesRadar+ and lives in Brooklyn, New York. She joined GamesRadar+ in 2017, revitalizing the news coverage and building new processes and strategies for the US team.