Blade, the French startup behind cloud gaming service Shadow , has been acquired by Octave Klaba’s fund following a commercial court order. Klaba is better known as the founder of OVHcloud , a French cloud hosting company. He’s acquiring Blade (and Shadow) through his investment fund Jezby Ventures — not OVHcloud. Blade had declared bankruptcy and was going through the reorganization process.
While I’m not focused on the Epic vs Apple court case until it’s over, there’s details in that case about Walmart’s unannounced cloud gaming service, codenamed Project Storm. Confidential emails are revealed detailing the technology, based on LiquidSky, which is another Windows PC for cloud gaming solution. It uses IBM Cloud’s bare metal servers and Nvidia GPU’s. The service is not launched, and it’s unknown if Walmart plans to continue.
Let’s also cover Mighty – I’m not usually one for products… How about Mighty, which is a streaming Chromium browser in the cloud. Designed to make Chrome faster, Over the last two years, Mighty designed a custom server to “keep costs low,” built a low-latency networking protocol, and forked Chromium to “integrate directly with various low-level render/encoder pipelines.”
Why do we care?
I’ve covered Microsoft’s Cloud PC initiative before, and I just want to highlight all of the various cloud and application streaming options in play. Microsoft has xCloud too in the gaming space.
I liken streaming to another form of SaaS. It’s why I notice this space – it you connect this with Zero Trust, and you can isolate out applications fully and not trust the device below, there’s some reason to care as this space develops. The gaming use case is a brutal one for responsiveness, so if it works for gaming, it will work for most scenarios. That’s the interest to track these.
I also can’t resist commenting that the solution to making Chrome faster is a giant cloud supercomputer rather than just.. making it faster.
