Alienware’s Concept Nyx is like a Plex server for your PC games | Engadget

What if you could could start playing Halo Infinite on your TV, continue mowing down grunts during a bathroom break, and finish your session on a laptop when you’re supposed to be working? That’s the basic idea behind Alienware’s Concept Nyx, a server that’s powerful enough to run all of your games throughout your home network. Think of it like Plex for gaming, but instead of opening up your video library, it’s all about bringing your games to all of your devices.

Given the push towards game streaming from Google Stadia and Xbox, Alienware may have stumbled on an interesting solution for multi-gamer homes. You could conceivably run two games at once on your television, as we saw during a recent demo in NYC. Or you could play Cyberpunk while someone else perfects their Rocket League skills on another device. Since all of the rendering and network processing is happening in your home, Nyx would also be a lower latency experience than traditional cloud gaming, which relies on servers hundreds of miles away.

Concept is the key word here, though. Alienware representatives wouldn’t tell us what’s powering the mysterious Nyx server, which looked like an enormous gaming desktop. And while Engadget’s Cherlynn Low and I were able to play Cyberpunk 2077 and Rocket League simultaneously on a single TV, the games were running in tiny windows. It wasn’t anywhere near the sleek half-screen experience Dell is showing off in promotional pictures.

Much like Alienware’s Concept UFO, a Switch-like portable gaming PC that was first demoed two years ago, Nyx may never see the light of day. But we could see elements of it in future products, much like the way the UFO controller is being used demonstrate Nyx. The game server concept could eventually simplify streaming from your rig. That’s something we can already do with Steam’s Remote Play feature, but perhaps Dell could make it a bit easier to play all of your titles throughout your home. The company says it’s also exploring ways to run four games at once, as well as methods of collecting all of your titles, no matter where you installed them.