Source: Alienware
Alienware is toying around with the idea of making gaming in a multi-gamer home a more seamless experience. Ahead of CES 2022, the Dell-owned brand showed off its Concept Nyx prototype.
It's a powerful server capable of running the games on your home network. The server parks near your modem or router and directly connects via Ethernet. It can stream from the cloud to your devices over Wi-Fi, allowing different household members to play different games simultaneously or play multiplayer games together without affecting your Wi-Fi speed or causing any input lag.
Source: Alienware
Another application is you can be playing something on your TV in the living room at one time and then switching to your laptop when you feel like moving into your bedroom. The Concept Nyx wants to centralize your video game library into one server and make it playable on all your devices.
Engadget reported that Alienware wouldn't share what powers the Nyx server, but it looks like a giant gaming desktop. It's also using an older Alienware concept, the Concept UFO, as its controller. Alienware conceptualizes that this controller can carry your logins and game library and allow you to pick up where you left off in a game. That latter might happen quite literally with proximity detection.
Source: Alienware
The company is exploring ways to let it run four games at once and methods of collecting all of your titles into one, no matter where they are installed. It is a concept or prototype for now. There is no guarantee it'll see the light of day. As CNET noted, it can run into interoperability issues with other manufacturers' products, so we aren't banking on this making an appearance in its current form. But perhaps the tech can make its way to the market in bits and pieces. We'll definitely keep our eye out for that.