Plex Arcade with 27 Atari Games Launched via Subscription: How to Subscribe, Requirements, and More

Urian B., Tech Times 26 January 2021, 07:01 pm

Plex is quite popular for its service when it comes to streaming movies, TV shows, and even music from the user's own computer. The popular service is now adding something that could make it even more popular, streaming games!

Plex Atari Classic arcade games

According to Protocol, Plex has just announced its brand new service called the Plex Arcade on its own online blog and has also launched an official website for it. The service will cost just $3 a month for those that are already Plex Pass subscribers while it will cost $5 a month for those that aren't Plex Pass subscribers.

Instead of directly focusing on the modern console or the phone games just like its competitors, Plex has decided to focus more on letting their subscribers play Atari games. It seems like Plex is really taking the arcade name seriously where subscribers can easily play all those arcade classics coming from Atari like Missile Command, Centipede, Super Breakout, and other games coming from the Atari 2600 and the Atari 7800. Overall, there will be 27 games that are available to play via this service.

Arcade games online

Not like other game subscription services that require users to simply sign up and start playing from their console, Plex Arcade, however, still requires a few things. First is a running Plex Media server on either a Windows or a macOS computer. There also isn't Linux support because Plex is reportedly using Parsec in order to stream the player's gameplay.

This means that people will have to sign up for a particular Parsec account, if players do not have one existing, and log directly in to it using Plex. There will also reportedly be a little bit more freedom when it comes to what players can stream the games to as almost everything from Android devices to TVs, Google Chrome and tvOS and Apple iOS and can be played on any particular Bluetooth-enabled controller.

Plex Streaming

The service also reportedly supports players adding their very own emulators and ROMS, which would be nice, but according to the story by The Verge, could be overall quite hard to sell. Even at the official Plex Pass price of just $3 for a month, players are paying quite a lot for those games, at that point, can also basically run on a simple microwave. In order to be fair, it still does let players run them on something standard like an iPhone or an Apple TV, but what's cool is that the games are also readily available on both Android and PC.

For those interested to try the games out for nostalgia purposes, it might be worth a try. However, the article by The Verge says that this might require some time as getting everything set up proved an exercise and was also frustrating and that the writer from The Verge noted that no games were successfully played as tvOS and iOS clients would get stuck at the loading spinner and it also seemed that the keyboard controls were useless when it was played on Chrome.