The whole point of cloud is not owning the box, which leaves the pad as the one thing that can genuinely break on you. I found out the hard way that where you buy it decides what happens when it does. Direct from the manufacturer got me a straight replacement with no return required. The same fault on a marketplace order gets store credit instead, because the seller is bound by that platform's rules rather than the manufacturer's own policy. Worth spending the extra at checkout given it's the only physical thing in your setup

I’ve been a console guy for most of my life. I grew up with PlayStation and later had Xbox and Nintendo too. At one point I had multiple consoles at the same time.

But over time I realized I don’t really enjoy owning so many devices. I’m kinda minimalist when it comes to tech. I like having one thing that can do everything instead of a different box for every purpose.

Then in 2024 I tried ShadowPC with a Backbone controller attached to my iPhone.

It reminded me of gaming on my PC as a teenager because of the freedom. It’s just a Windows PC in the cloud so I can install whatever I want. Mess with old games, use mods, launchers, weird fixes… basically do whatever I want.

I can play The Crew 1 again despite Ubisoft shutting it down thanks to the PC community. Or I can randomly decide I want to explore Oahu in the legendary Test Drive Unlimited again.

The iPhone screen also makes colorful games like Art of Rally, Over the Hill or Forza Horizon look sooo good. Shadow lets you fill the entire screen too so it almost feels like the game is running natively on the phone. Everything looks so sharp.

This setup became even more important to me this year. I got cancer and ended up spending around half a year in and out of the hospital. Luckily the hospital had decent internet and I had basically no issues using Shadow there. From my experience Shadow doesn’t even seem to need some insanely good connection. It just needs to be stable. I couldn’t get GeForce Now to work properly there at all even with 5G.

I was still working from the hospital so I already had my MacBook and work stuff with me. Carrying another big handheld just for gaming would have felt like too much.

With Backbone I just had this small controller and the devices I already needed anyway. I even got to experience the launch of Forza Horizon 6 from my hospital room and play it from day one on my iPhone or MacBook without needing another device.

The funny thing is that I actually tried going back to consoles.

I bought a PS5 Pro, DualSense Edge, Portal and even PSVR2. I basically built the whole PlayStation ecosystem again.

And… I sold it.

PSVR2 was impressive but I quickly realized VR requires more effort than I usually want to put into gaming. Portal was a cool idea but the image quality while moving bothered me a lot. Especially in games like DayZ.

Last month I gave dedicated gaming hardware another try and bought a Steam Deck OLED with the new Steam Controller and the Docking Station.

It’s a really nice device especially with GeForce Now installed but somehow it still didn’t click with me. The screen resolution felt a bit low after getting used to how sharp everything looks on my iPhone. The Deck itself also felt too big for me while traveling. Even when gaming at home it somehow felt like… too much device.

I think I finally realized that I’m just a casual gamer. I work in IT and there’s always something new I want to learn or work on which I actually enjoy. So I don’t really want gaming to take too much of my time or money.

And somehow the Backbone fits that perfectly.

When I take a break from work I just attach it to my iPhone and do a quick lap in Assetto Corsa Evo or play a round of Party Animals. No separate gaming device sitting around waiting to be used.

If I want to play on the TV I just connect the Backbone to my Apple TV via Bluetooth. If I want to play a proper PC game with keyboard and mouse I can do that on my MacBook too.

One Windows PC in the cloud available on basically every screen I already own.

It’s ridiculously simple and minimalistic and I just love it.

At this point I’m starting to think that maybe I don’t actually want a gaming device anymore. I just want my games to be available on whatever device happens to be in front of me.

And somehow it makes me feel more attached to my games too. They don’t feel tied to a specific console or device anymore. It feels like my whole gaming library is always with me. Same games, same saves, same PC. Doesn’t matter if I’m on my iPhone, MacBook or TV.

The only real downside for me is games that simply don’t work on virtual machines like Star Citizen or ARC Raiders. I’m terrible at competitive online games anyway so I don’t feel like I’m missing much though.

Right now I’m mostly waiting for Over the Hill to come out. And looking further ahead I can totally see myself playing through GTA VI on that beautiful iPhone screen once the PC version eventually arrives.

Anyone else ended up feeling this way after getting into cloud gaming?

Im a student in japan and i recently bought an 2nd hand ipad air m1 and it came with a gamesir controller. My buddies from dormitory is telling me to start cloud gaming but im not sure where to start and how it works and since i dont have a wifi will that be a problem??

I still can’t believe it’s possible to play PC games on an iPad. 😭

Hello all, would love to hear some experiences using Parsec on M series macbooks, how is the experience and battery life? Currently am running a windows laptop for streaming and just cant stand the poor battery life.

Hey! I wanted to make a cloud pc service sort of thing, but make it for a relatively cheap hourly price (and quite possibly bare metal rather than a VM), and before I start, or invest money into anything, I wanted to know if anyone would even be interested in it (thus me writing all this :D)

Basically I was thinking of buying computers that have 1650s or 1660s, 16gb of ram, ryzen 5 3600 or simillar, and having them up for like 0.15$/hour at the beginning, cold/hot storage also being cheap, and bandwidth being dedicated.

So yeah, I dunno if there's a lot of demand on this or not, so please if you'd be interested in something like this or if you have any suggestions do send a comment!
P.s. I hope I'm not breaking any rules

I am sadly not a PS5 owner thanks to these price hikes and my xbox is not working currently but I still got to play games on my tab thanks to cloud gaming which made me wonder, what if playstation tried the same thing ? I am not talking about portal like a proper app or website for cloud playing on any device, will it hurt the playstation ecosystem ? I am not very smart but as I am seeing consoles getting so expensive the cloud gaming idea seems to be not so bad, I can be wrong though.

TLDR : Not a PS5 owner due to price hikes, wondering if ps can use cloud gaming beyond portal like xbox did, will it negatively affect their ecosystem ? The idea seems pretty logical seeing such price hikes.

Hey all, I have as a router a TP-Link Deco 7 Pro BE63. I have one node connected directly to the AT&T modem in the living room on the first floor, and the second node in the office on the second floor. Connection between these 2 nodes is strong. My PC on the room is connected to the MOL WiFi 7.

I installed Apollo and use on my iPhone Moonlight. I was not experiencing any type of lag, delays, or issues with bit rate. I decided to move the router near the PC to wired connect it.

Since then, my iPhone has bit rate issues, meaning that if there's a song playing, I hear when it cuts off. I also started experiencing a little bit of lag.

I even connected the PC to the main node and modem, and it keeps giving me the bit rate issue.

I decided to disconnected the PC, and put everything as it was, but all the issues mentioned above are persistent, any solutions recommended?

Im using a shit pc and cannot run spider-man so i need a cloud gaming free but lets me install mods

I run Linux on my desktop and have been endlessly searching for a good solution to replicate essentially what Apollo does on Windows - in-home game streaming to my steam deck, with virtual display support (Ultrawide monitor causes aspect ratio issues).

The only options I'd found relied on specific Linux compositor or distro setups, and required an awful lot of command line fiddling. The closest I got was Games on Whales, but that's docker based and more designed for creating your own personal GeForce Now server - overkill for my needs.

I've then found Moonshine, which I can't rave about enough. Seems to work across a wide variety of distros, a bunch of compositors / DE (I'm on Gnome Fedora), installation took about 5 minutes.

On top of that, I can now wake from LAN, and Moonshine will run in the background as a systemd service without me needing to login. I can finally just pickup my deck and not have to touch my PC at all, as long as it's not completely shut down.

I've only used it a bit, but performance seems rock solid so far. Can't recommend it enough and thought it worth shouting out.

After I move the gamepad, my session crashes and I tried everything, but nothing worked.

Just wanted to share a quick appreciation post and my honest takeaway after spending the last few weeks testing both platforms.

I recently gave Boosteroid’s Ultra tier a fair shot mainly because of their library catalog. But man, the actual stream experience was rough. Constant compression artifacts, muddy textures in darker scenes, and bitrate drops that made demanding titles look washed out, not to mention the headache with session stability and cloud saves. I even spent time tweaking browser extensions just to get an acceptable image.

A few days ago, I finally hopped back onto GFN Ultimate (with the RTX 5080 server rollout), and holy shit. It’s not even a fair comparison.

The visual clarity, actual AV1 stream quality, zero micro-stutters, and rock-solid latency make it feel like you’re sitting right in front of a high-end local rig. Everything just works out of the box without having to baby the stream settings or pray that your saves sync properly.

If anyone is currently sitting on the fence debating between Boosteroid Ultra and GFN Ultimate: do yourself a favor and go with GeForce NOW. Yes, Boosteroid might have a couple of titles you want, but the actual streaming quality, technical stability, and raw engineering on GFN are miles ahead. It’s not even close.

Shoutout to the GFN team for actually delivering what cloud gaming was promised to be. Feels damn good to be back.

This picture is at work, with an ipad connected to a host pc at home. At first i had problems with staying connected but tailscale is a lifesaver, i always have my 5070ti, 9800x3d desktop wherever i go as long as i have internet.

Sunshine and moonlight/voidlink saved me from buying a switch or windows portable console and gave me all my steam library on the go with 20ms latency and 120fps at the ipad's stock resolution.

I just cant thank the modders making this real enough for their work, and ok top of that for free of charge?

Playing through rdr2 right now and ffxiv.

I get a lower decode like 0.79 when playing from my phone using sunshine/moonlight but the pictures are from work pc with parsec.

Hi guys, so I’m trying to figure out cloud gaming, because I like to play CK3 Agot, but for last several months after all those updates my laptop cant handle it no more and after months someone advised using cloud gaming as solution.

The part that I need help with is that some cloud gaming solutions dont allow steam mod workshops which I need for agot, others say its not available in my region which is Georgia🇬🇪 (country). Some told me that Shadow is good to use here, but when I went there it said that my billinh address has to be from supported country…

So any help will be much appreciated
Thanks in advance🤝