Plex, well known as a service for streaming movies, music, and TV shows from your own computer, is now adding another thing you can stream: video games. Plex announced the new service, called Plex Arcade, on its blog and also launched a website for it. The service will cost $3 a month if you’re a Plex Pass subscriber, and $5 a month if you’re not.
The game streaming service was spun out of Plex’s in-house incubator, Plex Labs, and represents more of a passion project for the company, rather than some larger shift in direction, we’re told. The technology to make it available was already 95% built, so the team decided to put together the game streaming service as a surprise for users, as well as a way to expand Plex’s core mission of becoming a broader entertainment platform.
The company says it actually kicked around the idea of adding games to Plex for years, but over the course of 2020 in particular, the team was drawn to the idea even more out of personal interest and a need for a distraction.
The game service was built with the help of new partner Parsec and its underlying, low-latency streaming technology, Plex says. This made it possible to bring fully playable game libraries to Plex.
To build the game library, Plex partnered with Atari to license a catalog of classic titles.
At launch, the full list of games include: 3D Tic-Tac-Toe, Adventure, Alien Brigade, Aquaventure, Asteroids, Avalanche, Basketbrawl, Centipede, Combat, Dark Chambers, Desert Falcon, Fatal Run, Food Fight (Charley Chuck’s), Gravitar, Haunted House, Human Cannonball, Lunar Battle, Lunar Lander, Major Havoc, Millipede, Missile Command, Motor Psycho, Ninja Golf, Outlaw, Planet Smashers, Radar Lock, Sky Diver, Sky Raider, Solaris and Super Breakout.
Unlike other game subscription services where you can simply sign up from your console and start playing, Plex Arcade has a few requirements. First is a Plex media server running on a Windows or macOS computer. There isn’t Linux support because Plex is using Parsec to stream the gameplay.
This means that you’ll have to sign up for a Parsec account, if you don’t already have one, and log in to it on Plex. There is a bit more freedom when it comes to what you can stream the games to, as Android devices and TVs are supported, as well as Google Chrome and Apple’s iOS and tvOS. Plex says you can play with “just about any Bluetooth-enabled controller.”
The service also supports you adding your own emulators and ROMs, which is nice, but it’s overall a bit of a tough sell. Even at the Plex Pass price of $3 a month, you’re paying a lot for games that, at this point, can basically run on a microwave. To be fair, it does let you run them on something like an iPhone or Apple TV, but the games are readily available on Android and PC.
Plex Arcade is available as of today.
