Blade wants its Shadow gamers to join a community Hive
The cloud gaming service's Hive Initiative adds screen sharing and control for multiplayer games, and other features.
Blade's enhancing its Shadow cloud-gaming-via-virtual-PC platform with a new community interface dubbed Hive that goes beyond standard chat with the ability to view and control other gamers' screens as well as your own -- facilitating, for instance, an improved co-op experience as well as random hijinks.
For instance, in theory it could give you eyes in the back of your head by letting you see another player's view. Blade also will provide preset modes for, say, flipping the screens of all the players, effects overlays and hijacking their characters. It also can enable remote training and practice so an experienced player can show the newbie how it's done.
In other words, less chat, more show. And because Shadow slings streams to mobile devices, it means you can take advantage of all this on your phone or tablet.
You can overlay effects on all gamers' screens.
While Hive is currently limited to Shadow subscribers, Blade says it's not focused on keeping the features locked to its own subscribers; in other words, eventually fellow gamers on other platforms will be able to take advantage of pieces of this, too. The company is offering a developers' kit so software companies can customize support.
The announcement comes in conjunction with Blade's rollout of data center availability in Dallas -- it now covers most of the US -- and a partnership with Ubisoft's Nadeo Studio and esports' Team Envy.
