Alienware’s Nyx concept is a beastly at-home cloud gaming server

Alienware’s latest moonshot project, called Concept Nyx, is aimed at untethering gamers from their devices by bringing you a full-on cloud gaming server to your own apartment or home.

Through a pretty bulky piece of gaming hardware, the Concept Nyx acts as a central gaming server and hub for all your gaming needs, letting you stream to any device in the house. That means you could theoretically start your Cyberpunk 2077 save file in your room but eventually take it to the living room where you could take advantage of a larger screen.

The Concept Nyx also allows the streaming of several games at the same time, even to the same screen, through a single app so you and your roommates never have to argue whose turn for the TV it is. Before you get too excited, the Concept Nyx is still just a concept as the name implies, but it’s hard not to dream about the constant potential for LAN parties, either with a three-stack in Rocket League, killing zombies in Back 4 Blood, or even just building out a co-op farm in Stardew Valley.

Mystery box — Alienware hasn’t released any specs regarding its Concept Nyx, but its rather massive size offers hints that it’ll probably be one hell of a rig. Alienware said it’s meant to be able to power four game streams simultaneously, which will no doubt require a pretty powerful system. The Concept Nyx also allows you keep gaming in any room by switching devices but more importantly, Alienware’s concept is also looking to consolidate all your games into one central library. Having all your games in one location is definitely appealing, but it’s hard to tell how Alienware is going to attempt to wrangle all the different platforms and game launchers together.

Alienware isn’t the first to tackle cloud gaming, as Stadia and Nvidia GeForce Now have been passable options for a while now. Amazon has even thrown its hat into the mix and launched Luna, its take on cloud-based gaming, which has so far been fairly disappointing. But Alienware’s Concept Nyx and its local solution may solve the most glaring issue with cloud gaming: latency.

According to Alienware, the game processing happens locally instead of connecting to remote servers, so Concept Nyx would offer lower latency, greater bandwidth and more responsiveness when you game. Alienware said the multiplayer latency could reach single-digit milliseconds with Concept Nyx, pretty much removing the lag issues that you could run into with other current cloud gaming options.

Still a concept — Even though this central gaming hub in your apartment sounds pretty amazing, there are still a lot of details missing about Concept Nyx. Alienware said it’s still in development and offered no details about an actual release. If it’s any indication, Alienware previously unveiled its handheld gaming PC concept, called Concept UFO, that still has no signs of making it to market. Alienware did use the same controller design from Concept UFO with Concept Nyx, though.

Alienware also noted that further developments of Concept Nyx could benefit future products and enhance user experience. We’re not really sure what that means, but the company has at least been out demoing its Concept Nyx to Gizmodo and The Verge.