Should be part of plex pass
Plex Arcade is available for $4.99 per month and comes with a free one-week trial of the service.
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No.
I didn't see it in the article, but does this do remote multi-player? It would be cool if I could play games remotely with my friends.
Many of the games from this era were designed to be challenging with a zero latency connection to a CRT television, ie., in Super Mario Bros, when you press the jump button on an NES controller, the jump animation begins on the very next frame.
Now, imagine all the lag involved in a setup with a Bluetooth controller connected to, let's say some sort of underpowered, wifi-connected Android box, connected to a budget LCD TV, streaming an emulated 80s video game from your home computer running the server software, on an overloaded home network powered by an ISP-provided wifi modem.
Now imagine trying to play Ninja Gaiden on that.
I can see this system working really well when playing console RPGs from the era , but for the majority of games it will only result in frustration for the players and a rapid loss of interest in playing the games they fondly remember as a kid. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that it has an initially large amount of subscribers but I can only imagine that the churn rate will be very high.
I'd love to be wrong though! The concept is pretty cool but just my own personal experience with game streaming on a hard-wired network with an nvidia shield TV and a wired controller (essentially the most ideal setup for it) leads me to believe otherwise.
I really wish Plex would offer a couple versions of the server at this point, like a "Plex Lite" or some such. I really don't want or use all the extras they keep adding on. I only use it for my locally hosted content and all the other stuff they add seems to always break something else in the process. :-/
Also wish they would fix some things that don't work really well. For example, shuffle play is atrocious, pretty much plays the same content all the time, like say there is 100 episodes of a show and you shuffle it, it seems to play the same 10 episodes every time. Also "skip intro" feature seemed to get stuck processing on my server all the time, this might be just my particular setup though.
I get that they have to make money and that is fine, but maybe make these extra features as optional "add ons" that have to be installed separately rather than baking them in to the server base(I haven't looked at Arcade so maybe this isn't the case here but all the other shit that they have added previously just appears when you update the server whether you want it or not.)
P.S. Yes, I have tried Jellyfin and while it is decent I don't think it can quite replace Plex yet for my uses.
It would have been ok if this was free or bundled with Plex Pass and pay to play Plex hosted roms. If I want to play my own roms with friends better use Parsec or Moonlight for free.
Server needs to be running on Windows or Mac to work and have a compatible Parsec graphics card. For those of us who have Plex servers hosted on a NAS, Linux or in the cloud we are out of luck.
I just have so many questions for it, like how to map controls for instance
One use case (not that it's a valid one) is for folks that have their family members on their plex server and some of those family members are not technically savvy at all and love retro games. Just get them a bluetooth controller paired to their TV and they are ready to relive the glory days. I fall into this category.
That being said, I am not sure if I will pay the $3/month for it. I'll likely give it a spin though.
Ironic, I was quite intrigued at first because we just got a new Android based TV, and I was looking at simplifying an emulator setup as I already have the ROMs on NAS. But there's no way in hell I'd pay a monthly subscription for something any number of other applications can already do.
Buy a bluetooth game controller, turn any android phone or tablet into a poor mans switch. Emulators are $3.
This feels like a desperate move for Plex.
Weird that they charge $5/month, being that all those platforms can run Steam Link, AMD Link and Moonlight for free...