You don’t need a game console or a powerful PC to get into gaming. And we’re not talking about playing mobile games.
Game-streaming services let you play console-grade games on virtually any screen. A TV? A tablet? A phone? A laptop or, yes, a console? All can get in on the action.
There are currently four key contenders to consider. These are game streaming through Xbox Game Pass and PS Plus, Netflix GeForce NOW, and Amazon Luna. There’s another big name on the horizon, too.
But which gets you the best deal? Here’s the breakdown.
Xbox Cloud Gaming
Game Pass Ultimate – £12.99 a month
Xbox Cloud Gaming is included as part of a Game Pass Ultimate subscription, and it’s one of the easiest services to get your head around.
Most of the games on the Netflix-a-like Game Pass are available to stream through the cloud, and they can be accessed lots of ways. As well as playing on your Xbox console or PC, you can use your phone, a tablet, a web browser, a Meta Quest VR headset, or a recent Samsung smart TV.
There’s no need to own an Xbox at all. The bad bit is that the image quality is not at the same level as that of Sony’s PlayStation Cloud Streaming or Nvidia GeForce NOW. As well as losing detail thanks to the way gameplay is turned into a video stream, the graphics quality is only that of an Xbox Series S, Microsoft’s budget console. You can see this in action in a recent video made by Digital Foundry.
Sony PlayStation Plus
- PlayStation Plus Premium – £13.49 a month
- Plus Premium annual – £119.99
If you have a PlayStation 4 or PlayStation 5, you can stream games through a PS Plus Premium subscription. The cloud-streaming feature is only available to this top-end tier, not Extra or Essential.
That’s £13.49 a month, and you get access to hundreds of titles in the PlayStation Plus Catalogue, from the PS5, PS4, PS3, PS2 and PS1 eras. You can browse the titles over at the PlayStation website. New titles are added each month, and we tend to write about the additions as they are announced.
PlayStation Plus Cloud Streaming is available on PlayStation 5, PS4 and PC. However, the bad news is you will actually need a PS5 to play the latest titles. You can’t play games made for the PlayStation 5 console on PC or on a PS4, as you can with Xbox Game Pass and the latest games.
There’s an alternative, though: Remote Play. This long-standing tech lets you play games running on your PlayStation home console on your phone or tablet, with no added cost. It’s also the tech behind the popular PlayStation Portal handheld. If you’re just trying to sneak in some at-home gaming while others are watching TV, this might work.
Nvidia GeForce NOW
- Free with Ads
- Priority Day Pass – £3.99
- Ultimate Day Pass – £7.99
- Monthly subscription – Up to £19.99
- 6-month subscription – Up to £99.99
Nvidia set the bar with GeForce NOW, long regarded as the most stable and best-looking of the streaming services, although PlayStation Plus Cloud Streaming is catching up.
This one is a little different to the others. You don’t pay for access to the games as such, just the technology that gets them running over a server, beaming the video to your device.
You still have to own the games you want to stream, on Steam, Epic Games, GOG, Ubisoft Connect, Xbox or EA. That said, GeForce NOW also supports loads of free-to-play games, including Fortnite and Genshin Impact.
There are more than 100 of these free-to-play titles, and more than 1,800 games are supported in total, according to Nvidia. You can check the list out over at the Nvidia website.
More good news: there’s a completely free service you can try, powered by ads, and limited to a one-hour session length. You can just start another once that’s done, but that’s going to get old quick if you get sucked into a game. Ads display at the start of this hour, not in the middle.
A top NOW subscription costs £19.99 a month or £99.99 for six months (equivalent to £16.66 a month). That may seem steep considering it doesn’t include games you would otherwise pay for, but the offering is different here. For that money, you get visuals equivalent to a PC with an RTX 4080 graphics card, worth more than £1,000 on its own, including ray-tracing visual effects.
There’s also the Priority subscription, at £9.99 a month or £49.99 for six months. This gets you a mid-tier PC that plays games at full HD with ray tracing.
Alternatively, you can pay for day passes. £3.99 gets you 24 hours of “Basic rig” virtual PC, which plays games at full HD resolution, 60 frames per second with no fancy ray-tracing effects. £7.99 gets you the very best of GeForce NOW, for 24 hours.
Amazon Luna
- Play with Prime – £95 a year
- Luna+ – £8.99 a month
- Ubisoft+ Multi Access – £14.99 a month
- Jackbox games – £3.99 a month
Did you know Amazon has its own game-streaming service? It’s called Luna, and Prime members get access to it as part of their subscription.
There’s also a Luna+ subscription, which provides access to loads more games. But in the standard Prime tier you can already play Fortnite, Trackmania, and Rocket Racing, among others. You can also play games you own on Ubisoft Connect.
A Luna+ membership opens up lots of high-profile games like Resident Evil 2, Alien Isolation, Batman: Arkham Knight and Control, for £8.99 a month. The line-up isn’t as strong as that of Xbox Game Pass or the Playstation Plus Catalogue – but it’s decent.
Additionally, Luna can link up to Ubisoft+, for £14.99 a month. This is home to the Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, Watch Dogs and Tom Clancy titles, among others.
Or for families, you could just get the Jackbox sub for £3.99. It lets you stream a library of party games from the Jackbox series.
Luna’s image quality is not as good as GeForce NOW’s, limited to 1080p resolution and 60fps. But it’s one of the cheapest ways to get started with streaming, handy if you don’t mind a more limited library. Luna is available on browser, through Fire sticks and tablets, on iPhone and Android, and through some LG and Samsung TVs.
Netflix
- From £4.99 a month (TBC)
The latest game-streaming contender is the king of movie streaming, Netflix. In August, VP of Netflix Games Mike Verdu announced a test rollout of its game-streaming service, with just two titles and a “limited” number of users in “Canada and the UK”.
This beta lets you play nine games on TVs, PCs and Macs. The most notable titles include Oxenfree, Reigns, and Reigns: Three Kingdoms.
At the time of writing, though, only select subscribers receive access to this game-streaming test. Try logging in to the Netflix web interface on a laptop to see if you are part of the beta. There should be a Games area in the interface if you are.
Just like Netflix’s current mobile-gaming library, game streaming is included as standard with a Netflix subscription. And, at present, all tiers of Netflix member receive access to mobile games.
