Alienware unveils Concept Nyx ahead of the CES 2021

Just ahead of the CES 2022, Dell offered a peek into its vision of how the home gaming experience may look in the near future. The Alienware Concept Nyx inhabits a world where you can pause Fortnite or Forza Horizon 5 in the living room and continue playing in your bedroom.

Alienware’s Concept Nyx attempts to be a device where you can launch your games from across storefronts like GOG, Steam, or Epic and services like Xbox Cloud Gaming or Geforce Now, all aggregated within a single app that can operate on your phones, TVs, PCs, and other devices in the same way.

While many of those are technologically possible right now, Alienware hopes Concept Nyx will tie it all together with a lot more polish and reduced latency.

The prototype implementation by Alienware essentially showcased a game server, more or less a gaming PC on steroids, software, and an intelligent controller that combines them. Notably, the Concept Nyx is not a console like the Xbox Series X or S, PS5, or Nintendo Switch. Nor does Alienware want to displace a powerful gaming desktop or laptop, though games installed on the server might directly connect to a big screen.

The prototype showcased a monolithic, sharp-edged black tower that would be a park near a modem or router, directly connected to it via Ethernet and broadcasting games that are either installed on it or streaming from the cloud to devices over Wi-Fi. The Alienware Concept Nyx is intended to let household members play different games simultaneously and multiplayer games together without slowing down the Wi-Fi or input lag to a crawl.