Plex and Atari team up to form Media Server Voltron
Plex, in a further attempt to be your one stop shop for everything, is going to allow you to stream Atari 2600/7800 games (as well as a few of their free standing 80’s arcade machines) as well as add your own games and emulators.
TL;DR – Plex Arcade is yet another subscription based game streaming service, but this time you get to be the network operator who has to set up and deal with all the problems
Judging by the above it appears the games will play on your media server and be streamed to your destination Plex device meaning you can expect to have the ability to play any game almost anywhere (like Luna, Stadia, NVIDIA’s game streaming,) with the added benefit of you’re now the IT person responsible for introducing and combatting major lag that you wouldn’t have otherwise had.
Can you tell my streaming game experiences with pro services have not been particularly great?
I may be misjudging the thing, but it really doesn’t look like it’s a lot more than a transcoder that’s going to run against a window running on your Plex server, and the end point being whatever smart device you’ve got. The endpoint smart devices at this point are Fire TV, Android, Android TV, Apple TV, iOS, macOS desktop, Plex Web App, Windows.
I’m not seeing Chromecast casting ability, but if it exists chances are it would be required to cast through your phone for the controls.
Overall, an interesting idea, it doesn’t expand any on things I already have, and is charging about $2.99 a month (with plex pass, $4.99 without,) for a few Atari games I own originals of and am pretty sure I own the app Atari released that has them all. The actual streaming is done by your equipment on your network so yeah, $2.99 for some old games and a feature.
It’s an interesting development, but I wish Plex would focus on getting their Vizio / Smartcast clients to not suck so dang hard in comparison to the Roku / Android versions. I mean this is something that I’d pay $5 to get the functionality of but I have negative zero interest in monthly paying for a game subscription.
[Plex]
