Known as a service for streaming movies, music and TV shows from your own computer, Plex now adds something you can stream: video games (via Protocol). Plex announced the new service called Plex Arcade on its blog and also launched a website for it. The service costs $ 3 per month if you are a Plex Pass subscriber, and $ 5 per month if you are not.
Instead of concentrating on its modern console or phone games like its competitors, Plex lets you play with Atari games. It takes the arcade name seriously because you can play arcade classics from Atari, like Millipede, Super Breakout, en Missile mission, as well as games from the Atari 2600 and 7800. Overall, there are 27 games available on the service.
Unlike other game registration services where you can simply log in and start playing from your console, Plex Arcade has some requirements. First is a Plex media server running on a Windows or MacOS computer. There is no Linux support because Plex uses Parsec to stream the game.
This means that if you do not have one yet, you will need to sign up for a Parsec account and sign up for Plex. There’s a bit more freedom when it comes to where you can stream the games, as Android devices and TVs are supported, as well as Google Chrome and Apple’s iOS and tvOS. Plex says you can play with ‘almost any Bluetooth enabled controller’.
The service also supports you to add your own emulators and ROMs, which is nice, but it’s generally a bit tricky to sell. Even at the Plex Pass price of $ 3 per month, you pay a lot for games that can basically work on a microwave at this point. To be honest, it allows you to play on something like an iPhone or Apple TV, but the games are easily available on Android and PC.
If you are interested in playing it for nostalgic purposes, it may be worth a try, but you may want to take some time for it – setting it up was a frustrating exercise for me, and I was never really able to play a game successfully. (The iOS and tvOS clients are stuck with a boot spinner, and keyboard controls seem to do nothing when they try to play on Chrome.)
If you want to try it for yourself, there is a free trial period of seven days, although you will need to insert a credit card or link to PayPal. Plex says it’s mostly a skunk-work-type project and says in the blog post that ‘[i]If there is interest and we see some topics, it will grow into the glorious pheasant we know it can be. But if you drop the ball, it’s going to die on the vine like a hole-goomba. ‘Hard.