Hanging out for a compact, SteamOS-powered gaming machine for your living room? Well, you shouldn’t have to wait too much longer — we’re only a couple of months away from Valve’s vision of couch-gaming nirvana. Alienware will almost certainly be first cab off the rank, with a SteamOS variant of its Alpha home theatre PC.
Alienware showed off the new Alpha — the compact, console-sized box that will be its Steam Machine — down in Melbourne at PAX 2015 over the weekend, but our pals at Kotaku also spoke to Alienware planning and development manager Joe Olmsted — who said that the Alpha would ship in Australia early next year, and would be bundled with Valve’s Steam Controller.
That revelation means that we’ll getting Steam Machines and the Steam Controller at the same time, and hopefully also the Steam Link, a sub-$100 TV set-top box that’ll wirelessly talk to a more powerful gaming PC in your house and display its graphics-accelerated video output on your big screen. The hold-up is regulatory; Alienware’s Steam Machine is still going through Wi-Fi certification hurdles in the States, and Alienware is focusing its attention there before moving on to Australia.
As Steam Machines go, the Alienware Alpha is actually a pretty gutsy little box; you can already buy it with Windows 8.1 pre-installed in Australia, in configurations starting with an Intel Core i3 and 4GB of RAM up to an i7 and 8GB, all with mechanical hard disks and a semi-custom laptop-grade Nvidia GeForce GTX graphics card with 2GB of onboard memory. The guys at TechGeek actually got some hands-on time with the Alienware machine, so check out the video below if you’d like to know more.