Plex has jumped into an unexpected pool, starting to offer a streaming games service called Plex Arcade.
Plex Arcade: Game streaming on your own devices
Unlike other streaming game services, and as with the Plex server, the stream will not depend on the company’s infrastructure, but on the one, you already use to run your personal server. And yes, you need to already be a Plex user (although you don’t need to be a Plex Pass user) and, therefore, have your own server to be able to use this new service.
Now, before you start thinking about what machine you would need to be able to serve Cyberpunk 2077 in 4K at 60FPS with ray tracing, it is important to clarify that the Plex Arcade catalog is limited, at least for the moment, to great Atari classics. Titles such as Centipede, Avalanche, and Gravitar make up the, for the moment very limited, offer of titles of the service. Thus, we are talking about a proposal aimed exclusively at users who are already combing their hair, and where nostalgia can justify the $4.99 monthly cost of the service ($2.99 per month if you have a Plex Pass subscription).
At the moment, the service is still in the testing phase, something that its managers are very confident that the service will be successful and will last over time, so it has other important limitations. Since it uses Parsec to work, it is only possible to deploy Plex Arcade on Plex servers on Windows and macOS systems, for the moment neither Linux nor NAS and NVIDIA SHIELD devices can be used for this service.
So to sum it up, you need to have your own server (as with Plex Server, but limited to Windows and macOS), the catalog is limited. And the price is almost five dollars a month.
But Plex Arcade catalog might grow soon, either focusing on nostalgia mode or as a more general streaming games platform, although this would require a greater investment in infrastructure on the part of the user.
