Plex Arcade Suggestions from a Plex fanatic

[PMead182]

To begin, I can’t tell you how many times over the years I googled “plex but for games” (or something similar) in search of what you’ve recently launched. Being such a avid user of Plex, I was thrilled you were exploring this area.

That being said, I’m going to watch it’s development with great interest but already I have seen some issues of concern.

1.) I saw in a previous post that plex arcade would not be offered free for those with a plex lifetime membership…and i actually think that IS very fair. (why should we expect you to give a whole new different service for free? developing this stuff costs money and no doubt you want to benefit from it.) The obvious compromise would be to offer a SEPARATE lifetime membership option for the ARCADE side of plex in addition to your existing product. That would be something I can imagine plex fans could get on board with. But a monthly sub? I was a little surprised that is the only option you are giving users…but if you had $100 lifetime membership i would sign up tomorrow. The reason I’d be concerned about this is that a lot of consumers out there are reaching a threshold for how many more monthly subscriptions they can stomach. Every company and their mom is asking for monthly subscriptions to services. Back when plex media servers were launched, it was beyond refreshing that FINALLY there was a company that gave an option besides just monthly subscription, and thus Plex brilliantly separated itself from others with it’s lifetime membership option. Being the first company to do it for games as well amidst a sea of “monthly-subscription-to-play-classic-game” companies that are already out there would be the classic Plex move I would’ve expected.

2.) It seems that to get the games working, it isn’t as user-friendly as people hoped based on the reviews so far, but I have faith you are already working on this. One of Plex’s biggest strengths is ease-of-use for the user…I was a little surprised so many of the people that has reviewed plex arcade has expressed frustration getting things to work. The spirit of Plex is “drop-and-go” and BAM you’re all set. Being able to do that for Emulators and roms would be nothing less than beautiful and would be applauded by emulator enthusiasts who have been craving a more user-friendly frontend for their games.

3.) I think the NAS media servers are going to just keep getting more and more popular. If Plex arcade could somehow be run from NAS one day then WOW, that would be a huge game-changer in the world of at-home game streaming. Hope this happens soon.

To summarize, I gotta say “Well done!” in exploring this feature. I just hope you continue to set yourself apart from all the other companies by going about it in the “plex fashion”: Don’t force people into only monthly subscriber options with no lifetime option, and keep making things as user-friendly and accessible as you have done with your Plex Media Server product.

I really am one of your biggest fans and have have always encouraged anyone that will listen to check out what Plex can do for them, because you all rock for what you’ve done and I want to stay a life-long Plex user for everything.

Thank for for taking the time to listen, and good luck with the Plex Arcade development.

-Patrick

PS- despite that NAS support is not available yet, i would still purchase a separate lifetime arcade pass as soon as it’s offered so long as there is a plan to have it supported there one day in the future.

[GlennPegden]

I’m in a similar boat, I’m a keen retro gamer that’s been craving a plex(like) UI/launcher for years. As I’ve been tracking this closely since the first release I can probably save the Plex folks a job and answer some of that.

1 & 3 are down to the fact that Plex Arcade is reliant on a third party product (parsec) for the game-streaming, without it, the arcade feature would probably have never seen the light of day (or at least, not so quickly), however that 3rd party engine is licensed per user per month, so Plex have to build that into their pricing model. Also there is no linux based client for it, for Plex to support it, they’d essentially be writing their own alternative from scratch. It sucks, but when the alternative is no plex-arcade, it’s the better option.

2 is more interesting. Whilst I agree the experience isn’t yet at the level of “user friendly” you now expect from a fully formed Plex feature, I feel three things I feel would make it much better

i. Better error handling (and to be fair, this did improve massively in the last release, but there is still more to do, especially in the area around Parsec errors). No more signed 32bit int error codes and more “your GPU isn’t supported” type messages.

ii. Built in core manager. It’s s god send for getting you set up and working, but it shouldn’t be needed. A nice UI to select cores built into the plex server UI to enable and download cores to the right place would save first timers a massive headache.

iii. Unzip roms into the “session” folder (or whatever it’s officially called). I’ve not got my heard around why libretro seems to handle zip files invisibly and plex doesn’t, but simply forcing the unzip of roms to a known temp location upon game start (so it doesn’t matter if your roms are zipped or not) would again solve some of that initial pain.

Sure, do all that and we’d all be screaming for new features (more cores, media/keyboard/mouse support, remappable keys, access to mame system config etc) instead, but it might make that initial first experience with the arcade less painful.

[Grooverider2016]

@GlennPegden

Sure, do all that and we’d all be screaming for new features (more cores, media/keyboard/mouse support, remappable keys, access to mame system config etc) instead, but it might make that initial first experience with the arcade less painful.

New cores for different consoles are on their way. Just taking time for them to edit the back end to support the roms (CD/DVD image based)

[GlennPegden]

I know, but however many we get, we’ll always want MORE cores

I mean, I’ve spent the week with a greaseweazel recovering discs from a 30 year old computer system that was hardly sold outside of the UK. I can’t imagine anyone else cares, but I’d still love it in Plex one day!