Our cloud games catalog currently contains games available from GeForce NOW, Xbox Cloud Gaming, Blacknut, Utomik, Amazon Luna and Boosteroid’s “library” collection. However the catalog doesn’t currently include games from PlayStation Plus (PS+) Premium, Shadow, airgpu or Boosteroid’s “install” collection of games. Why is that?
It isn’t a matter of laziness, although I wouldn’t blame you for thinking that! It is actually an intentional editorial decision that I take responsibility for. I asked the team to follow some guidelines on which games are included, and so far, I haven’t been thrown off the Cloud Dosage boat.
The exact reasoning is different for each service or game, but the decision comes down to what I believe a reasonable gamer expects at minimum from a cloud gaming service and a game available in the cloud. I consdider both PS+ and Shadow (and similar services like airgpu etc.) to be outside of the mainstream cloud gaming space. I do not believe they currently meet the expectations that an average visitor to our site would have of a cloud gaming service. That is not to say there is anything wrong with them. Both are a very valuable service to many people. But let me explain the reasoning here, and why I believe PS+ games will eventually be added but Shadow games will likely not.
Why are PlayStation Plus Premium Games Not Listed?
PlayStation Plus Premium has, in principle, all the ingredients needed to be a compelling cloud gaming offering – except the very important ability to actually play the cloud-hosted games on places where people want and would reasonably expect to be able to play. Right now, PS+ cloud gaming is limited to playing on PlayStation consoles themselves as well as a single desktop/laptop OS (Windows)
One of the major raison d’etre for cloud gaming, is to enable gamers to play their games across multiple new screens. In particular, I believe cloud gamers expect to be able to play their games on at least more than 1 of the following set:
- iOS Phones and Tablets
- Android Phones and Tablets
- MacOS Laptops and Desktops
- Windows Laptops and Desktops
- Linux Laptops and Desktops
- Chromebooks / Chromebases
- tvOS TVs/Devices
- Android TVs/Devices
- Web OS TVs
- Tizen TVs
- FireTV TVs/Devices
As of now, PS+ cloud gaming supports only a single element of that set. Frankly speaking, for now, the places you can play PS+ cloud games are places you could have already played most of the included titles without the service.
Were PS+ cloud gaming to expand to support even one more element of the list above (which may indeed happen in the future), I’d reconsider, and we’d likely begin including the titles in our database.
Why are Shadow Games Not Listed?
Shadow (or Shadow PC) and similar services like airgpu are valuable services for the community. However, they are not really Cloud Gaming Services, they are complete Virtual Cloud Desktops. They give you access to a complete Windows Desktop (hosted in the cloud) that you can do anything with. You can run Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop, and yes, you can install the Steam and Epic platforms.
Because of this, we don’t list the titles you can technically run on these services for two reasons:
- The question of whether a PC game can be played on Shadow is not interesting. The answer is always yes! If someone is asking the question: “can game X be played on Shadow?” – they likely simply don’t really understand what Shadow is. We try to address that in different areas of this website. However, listing every game that can be played on Shadow would reach 100’s of thousands of titles and amount to an exercise in spamming the internet.
- I don’t think that landing in a full Windows environment (where they are to install and manage all software and storage space) is what the average visitor to this site would expect from a cloud gaming service. There is little philosophical difference to this model than just using a remote desktop client (VNC etc.) to access your own desktop remotely. And, I don’t think an average person would consider a VNC like setup (even with low latency) to be a particularly new or novel gaming solution in the spirit of the services we do include.
For these reasons, I don’t expect to ever add a comprehensive list of Shadow titles to our catalog. There have been times when even I really wanted to. We all know, for example, that a Hogwarts Legacy page would get a lot of clicks. But, ultimately, what we want to do here at Cloud Dosage is value the cloud gaming space (and encourage innovation) as well as value our readers by giving them as high-quality information as we can.
