On Tuesday, American video game rental company GameFly launched a cloud-based game streaming service exclusively on the Amazon Fire TV set-top box. The new subscription service, simply named GameFly Streaming, piggybacks off the technology and servers used by Playcast, an Israeli cloud-gaming service that GameFly has officially acquired as of today.

"Our goal with GameFly Streaming is moving forward to position cloud gaming, in the short and medium-term, as a compliment to console gaming, and in the long term, as the new technology," GameFly CEO David Hodess said in a phone interview with Ars Technica. "Nobody I speak to these days believes that there’ll be another set of consoles as successors to the current ones."

The service, which should already be live in the Amazon Fire TV App Store, is made up entirely of PC ports of console games, meaning players will need a compatible Xbox-styled controller (such as the official Amazon Fire TV controller) to play them. To access the service's launch library of 35 games, users will have to try out an unorthodox subscription model: a series of game "packs" that users must subscribe to individually.

Pack it up, pack it in

Packs start at a rate of $6.99 a month, and each one currently unlocks unlimited play of seven games in a given genre. For example, the "Lego" pack includes seven Lego-branded games—pretty much all of the most recent ones, including Lego: The Hobbit and Lego Batman 3: Beyond Gotham—while the "speed" pack includes six admittedly older racing games, such as GRID 2, Moto GP '13, and Ridge Racer Unbounded, along with the 2001 arcade-flying game Ace Combat 4. The "gamer" pack is the closest GameFly Streaming comes to a discounted bundle, offering 16 games across its library for $9.99 a month. The full list of games and packs is available on GameFly Streaming's official site.

This pricing structure differs from streaming services like PlayStation Now , which offers both a flat rate for access to most of its streamable games and a la carte pricing for one-game rentals, and Nvidia Grid , which is offering free service until July, but limits its access to users of Nvidia's family of Shield devices.

"We do have plans to refresh these packs over the course of a year," Hodess said, but he didn't clarify exactly how often customers should expect new games—or how often older games in a pack might be retired. "If you’re still interested in a certain genre, we’ll hopefully provide enough games to keep you interested. Otherwise, we hope there’s another pack you’re interested in."

GameFly Streaming's launch library leaves a lot to be desired, especially compared to Nvidia Grid's 50 games and PlayStation Now's even larger library, but the service's current ace-in-the-sleeve is its impending launch on a wider variety of devices than any other current game-streaming service. "We are absolutely going to be on other platforms," Hodess said, and while he didn't offer a timeline, he noted that Playcast's original app, which is already available on Ouya systems and select smart TVs, will change to GameFly Streaming "over the next several months."

Update: Even though GameFly Streaming's site says the service is "coming soon," the app has indeed launched on Amazon's App Store, exclusively for Amazon Fire TV boxes at this point. We downloaded and installed the app on our own Fire TV unit on Tuesday morning and got it running on WiFi, at which point the app suggested we plug in an ethernet cable to improve performance—even when we switched to our router's 5 Ghz signal.

With an Ethernet cable plugged in, we were informed that the app had improved to a 720p signal streaming at 8 Mbps—which seemed a little pesky for our test unit's gigabit connection. The menus, whose button taps had a hint of lag, didn't appear to reach 720p resolution, however, nor did the games, which suffered from some pretty severe visual artifacting.

In good news, users get ten whole minutes of free demos per game, which we figure is a fair offer for people who want to test streaming performance on their home connections. We put three games to the test: 2D fighting game BlazBlue, 3D car game Ridge Racer Unbounded, and Pac-Man: Championship Edition DX. All of these suffered from noticeable but inconsistent moments of lag; this was forgivable in some instances, but as Pac-Man reached ludicrous speeds in that game's updated, remixed modes, we absolutely couldn't compensate to turn sharp corners and grab last-second power pellets.

That, to us, was a dealbreaker, especially when connected to this cloud-gaming service with one of the highest-level consumer-grade Internet connections currently available to Americans. We can't even imagine how an average Time Warner or Comcast customer would manage. Considering this cloud-gaming service already existed as Playcast for over a year, we're not chalking this up to day-one jitters, either.