You can now stream retro games to your browser, TV and Android devices with Plex Arcade

With more people spending time at home for the past year, we’ve all got more time on our hands that we would have otherwise spent commuting to work. That time has been spent rather well, catching up on our favourite Netflix shows and playing games.

While services like Apple Arcade and Google Stadia have been growing in popularity, they’re usually focused on letting your phone or computer take advantage of the latest games featuring the latest graphics. Plex, the service that allows you to stream your shows and music from a web server or your own hosting, says it wants to let you ‘stream’ classic and retro video games to Chrome, your smart TV, and Android devices with ‘Plex Arcade’.

Plex has partnered with Parsec to leverage their low latency technology to offer ‘full playable’ game libraries on the service, the company said on Tuesday. Another partnership with Atari will bring a fully licenced catalog of games for Plex users, including classic titles like Centipede, Lunar Lander and Motor Psycho.

These licensing deals will cost the company, though. So even if you already bought Plex Pass, you’ll need to spend an additional $3 over the usual fee. Plex is also offering a week’s trial time before you can sign up for Plex Pass and Plex Arcade for $5 in total.

Plex says the server will only work on Windows and macOS, because Parsec doesn’t offer their libraries on Linux. This means your SteamOS, Linux distributions and NVIDIA Shield devices are out of luck. The company also says that this is being treated as a ‘Kickstarter’ project and its future will be decided by the response it receives from the public. Whether it will be successful is something only time will tell.