A year ago, Plex was proud to announce the addition of video games to the streaming media server/solution in the form of “Plex Arcade“. We originally spoke about it in January 2021, when Plex was partnering with Atari to deliver this. It does (did) require an additional monthly subscription ($3+/month) in order to add this feature to your server, but it was a step toward something potentially great.
However, things haven’t been working out so much for the service. Likely, a lot to do with a low number of users subscribers. In addition to that, some users have claimed that they couldn’t get most games to stream properly, claiming limited or no control.
Many users weren’t even aware that the feature was available to them. Many others forgot about the announcement and continued on without a thought. This doesn’t help the rollout of something as (clearly) complicated as this.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/szxin1/comment/hy6ynhr/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
If there weren’t enough subscribers, I am sure that companies like Atari wouldn’t be too invested either, reducing the amount of effort being applied to further development to iron out these bugs.
It is too bad as the feature was promising. The thought of setting up your own Game Pass-like server filled with some of your favorite games of old is an interesting idea. However, many of these games are available as “classic collections” for most video game consoles or computer systems. So being tethered to a monthly subscription problem wasn’t going to draw too many people in.
What would have really been killer is if Plex somehow found a way to stream a library of installed PC games or ROMs, allowing the user to be in total control of the content. The latter of two options tricky since they’d have to implement a way to prevent pirating at the same time.
There is no telling if Plex will try to re-approach this idea in the future or not. I personally hope they give it another shot somehow in the future. So, hopefully, the option isn’t completely off the table. For now, you will have to say goodbye to the Plex Arcade as of March 31st. Plex announced that it will no longer be accepting new subscriptions and current subscribers will no longer be charged any further.
Meanwhile, Plex continues to be one of the best media server solutions out there for everything else still. At least, for music and video. Not only that but it is a solution that is constantly being improved upon with new features coming out all the time. Who knows what’s next for the company.
2 Comments
Honestly Plex should have had an option that streamed the ROM from the Plex server and simply used Retroarch on the client instead of the server. Retroarch supports a ton of OSs that could have enabled this and most clients are powerful enough to run emulators for older games. This could have gotten rid of the latency and lag issues and allowed Plex to serve as the backup and content location which is what people really want from Plex anyway.
Plex Arcade actually did just what you describe. In addition to the library of mostly Atari classic games, you could integrate the Plex Arcade service with a Parsec account to stream your own collection of ROMs to any device that supports a Plex client, including smart TVs and streaming sticks. The Parsec integration was a bugbear that required way too much graphics horsepower to drive a basic ROM emulator, but once you got it working, it was pretty cool. I hope they return a similar functionality down the road.