So, I bought this lifetime “Plex Pass” some time ago. I must be delusional but I thought buying something called “Plex Pass” would be my pass to all things Plex. So Plex goes and gathers up a bunch of 40+ year old Atari ROMs from the pubic domain and decides they should upsell access to Plex Pass holders for $36 per year. Frickin; RUDE.
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Just wanted to clarify a few things here:
Plex Pass has always been about features, but we’ve said that we couldn’t necessarily include content. The Atari ROMs (content) are not in the public domain, they cost money to license from Atari, as well as the streaming technology. Because of these two costs, we couldn’t include it in a Plex Pass.
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@elan What people want is the feature to be included in Plex Pass if you supply your own BIOS and ROMs like every other emulator platform. Almost all people that are interested in this feature already have a Raspberry Pi or better running RetroArch or similar. I doubt a lot of people are going to want to pay this amount simply to enable remote streaming. In most situations you could simply bring a Raspberry Pi with you. Basically all of these emulators can run on a Smartphone or even a handheld device made for retro games. You are targeting a niche of a niche audience with this feature in its current implementation. I would not doubt a lot of the people subscribed to this are simply ignorant of the other options available. I understand from a business perspective this was an easy decision. Plex is very interested in bringing other forms of revenue in which is understandable. The company you partnered with to bring this feature already had most of the work done and you simply needed to integrate it into Plex but as stated this feature does not bring good value to your customers and does more harm in the perception of Plex as a brand going forward than good. I watched the reaction to this launch and everyone was excited till they heard it is a subscription and since launch nobody even mentions it anymore. I subscribe to several retro game You Tube channels and they made one video at launch and could not recommend it and have not covered it since. This could have brought a whole new group of users into Plex but that is off the table now.
P.S.
Where is ebook, audio book, and comic book support?
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I think you missed the point. Plex servers are very much run by enthusiasts with some to a lot of knowledge, but often provided to our friends and family who often have little to no knowledge of how these things work. I for one will let my children use the arcade feature but dont want to be having to mess around with setting up retroarch on each and every device that they want to use it on. All they need to do is simply open up plex and play the games, no switching apps, no tweaking settings depending on console choice. Just a straight forward single interface where they can switch from watching a film, to listening to music, to playing Sonic. This is the market that Plex arcade fills, not the avid retro enthusiast. Not to mention that my son can play sonic/mario on his phone, switch to his kindle and pick up exactly where he left off, then jump to the fire tv stick to finish the level when he gets home… Simplicity.
All this has been done in house, the actual streaming features are provided by PArsec and this has a cost to a business as they have to pay for corporate licencing to use the product and to have the support levels required.
On the licencing front I dont have an issue with paying for it but would be hoping Plex will look to strike a deal with Parsec to offer us as consumers a Concurrent Licence subscription model. Ideally I would like to be able to buy a licence for say 6 concurrent users so that at any one time, i can have 6 users playing the Arcade as one of those users finishes playing, another user can then play when that session is freed up on my server. The same model i use for my IPTV subs.
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