You don’t need a game console or powerful PC to start gaming. And we’re not talking about playing mobile games.
Game streaming services let you play console-quality games on virtually any screen. A television? A tablet? A phone? A laptop or, yes, a console? Everyone can join in on the action.
There are currently four main contenders to consider. These are game streaming via Xbox Game Pass and PS Plus, Netflix GeForce NOW and Amazon Luna. There’s also another big name on the horizon.
But what gets you the best deal? Here’s the breakdown.
Xbox cloud gaming
Game Pass Ultimate – £12.99 per month
Xbox Cloud Gaming is included as part of a Game Pass Ultimate subscription, and it’s one of the easiest services to understand.
Most games on the Netflix-like Game Pass can be streamed via the cloud and accessed in many ways. In addition to playing on your Xbox console or PC, you can also use your phone, a tablet, a web browser, a Meta Quest VR headset or a recent Samsung smart TV.
There is no need to own an Xbox at all. The bad thing is that the image quality is not on the same level as Sony’s PlayStation Cloud Streaming or Nvidia GeForce NOW. In addition to the loss of detail thanks to the way gameplay is converted 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 created by Digital Foundry.
Sony PlayStation Plus
If you have a PlayStation 4 or PlayStation 5, you can stream games via a PS Plus Premium subscription. The cloud streaming feature is only available for this top tier, not Extra or Essential.
That’s £13.49 a month and you get access to hundreds of titles in the PlayStation Plus catalogue, spanning the PS5, PS4, PS3, PS2 and PS1 era. You can browse the titles on the PlayStation website. New titles are added every 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. The bad news, however, is that you actually need a PS5 to play the latest titles. Games made for the PlayStation 5 console cannot be played on PC or PS4, as you can with Xbox Game Pass and the latest games.
However, there is an alternative: Remote play. This long-standing technology lets you play PlayStation home console games on your phone or tablet at no extra cost. It’s also the technology behind the popular PlayStation Portal handheld. If you just want to play some games at home while others watch TV, this can work.
Nvidia GeForce NOW
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Free with ads
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Priority Day Pass – £3.99
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Ultimate Day Pass – £7.99
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Monthly Subscription – Up to £19.99
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6 Month Subscription – Up to £99.99
Nvidia set the bar high with GeForce NOW, long considered the most stable and best-looking streaming service, although PlayStation Plus Cloud Streaming is catching up.
This one is a little different from the others. You don’t pay to access the games as such, just the technology that runs them on a server and sends the video to your device.
You still need to own the games you want to stream, on Steam, Epic Games, GOG, Ubisoft Connect, Xbox, or EA. That said, GeForce NOW also supports plenty of free-to-play games, including Fortnite and Genshin Impact.
There are more than 100 of these free-to-play titles, and according to Nvidia, more than 1,800 games are supported in total. You can view the list on 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 a new one when you’re done, but that gets boring quickly when you get sucked into a game. Ads will appear at the beginning of this hour, not halfway through.
A top NOW subscription costs £19.99 per month or £99.99 for six months (equivalent to £16.66 per month). That may seem high, considering there are no games you would otherwise pay for, but the offering here is different. For that money you get visuals equivalent to a PC with an RTX 4080 graphics card, which is worth over £1,000 on its own, including ray-tracing visual effects.
There’s also the Priority plan, for £9.99 per month or £49.99 for six months. This gives you a mid-range PC that plays games in Full HD with ray tracing.
Alternatively, you can pay for day passes. For £3.99 you get 24 hours of ‘Basic rig’ virtual PC, which plays games at full HD resolution, 60 frames per second without fancy ray-tracing effects. For €7.99 you get the very best of GeForce NOW for 24 hours.
Amazon Luna
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Play with Prime – £95 per year
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Luna+ – £8.99 per month
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Ubisoft+ Multi Access – £14.99 per month
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Jackbox games – £3.99 per month
Did you know that Amazon has its own game streaming service? It’s called Luna, and Prime members get access to it as part of their subscription.
There is also a Luna+ subscription, which gives access to many 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 offers access to many high-profile games such as Resident Evil 2, Alien Isolation, Batman: Arkham Knight and Control, for £8.99 per month. The lineup isn’t as strong as Xbox Game Pass or the PlayStation Plus catalog, but it’s decent.
Additionally, Luna can connect to Ubisoft+ for £14.99 per month. This is home to the titles Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, Watch Dogs and Tom Clancy, among others.
Or for families you can just buy the Jackbox sub for £3.99. It allows you to stream a library of party games from the Jackbox series.
Luna’s image quality isn’t as good as GeForce NOW, limited to 1080p resolution and 60 fps. But it’s one of the cheapest ways to get started with streaming, useful if you don’t mind a more limited library. Luna is available in the browser, through Fire sticks and tablets, on iPhone and Android, and through some LG and Samsung TVs.
Netflix
The newest competitor in the game streaming space 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 are Oxenfree, Reigns and Reigns: Three Kingdoms.
At the time of writing, only select subscribers will get access to this game streaming test. Try logging into the Netflix web interface on a laptop to see if you’re in the beta. If so, there should be a Games area in the interface.
Like Netflix’s current mobile gaming library, game streaming comes standard with a Netflix subscription. And currently, all tiers of Netflix members get access to mobile games.