Ahead of CES 2022, Dell has given us a look at Concept Nyx, basically a way of organising your games in the one place, to be accessed on multiple devices.
So a Dell-branded Game Pass I hear you ask? Short answer? Kinda. Concept Nyx is more of a catalogue for all of your games. Game Pass, but not exclusive and better.
According to Dell’s Dave Zavelson, Concept Nyx is the company’s vision for a future gaming experience.
“It’s a solution that enables multiple gamers in a household to access their full gaming library and in a way that they can access on a variety of devices around the house,” he said during a press briefing.
“We’re enabling gaming experience to take your gaming session, your gaming experience from your PC game, to virtually any device around the house and move that with you, as you go from device to device.”
In a blog post penned by Dell’s client solutions CTO Glen Robson, the company describes Concept Nyx as “potentially solving one of the biggest challenges in PC gaming” one that is “changing the game completely”.
“How to simultaneously allow players in a household to easily access their full game library and play on any device, even if they want to change screens during gameplay. A tall order, but Alienware is hurtling towards a solution,” he says.
A Dell/Alienware branded catalogue, but it seems Dell isn’t about to push the exclusivity button (just yet, anyway).
During Q&A, Zavelson was asked specifically about interoperability, that is, where I have a game on the Epic Store and you have that same game via Steam. This was his response:
“We’re trying to unify the gaming experience and to eliminate some of the complexity of having to know what marketplaces people have bought games on and where you bought the game … we’ve stitched together all of those aspects.”
So regardless of where you purchased the game, Concept Nyx should just present you all your games.
Zavelson said with Concept Nyx you will see your full game library, not a subset, “no matter what game stores you purchase it on”. They will just be aggregated and presented to you together.
“If you think about your media content and the way that we’re all accustomed to using media today, your music, your video – you can access it on your phone, in your car, on your TV. Why should gaming be any different? Why can’t we access our gaming library in the same way that we do our media content?,” he added.
Speaking UI, the same interface will be common across any device. And if you pause a game in your loungeroom, you can pick it up in your bedroom. Or, as Zavelson shared during the media briefing, if he’s downstairs stuck on Cyberpunk, Concept Nyx will allow him to yell out to his son upstairs and virtually pass the controller to the kid to get him through the level. That part I’m here for.
Obviously this is all Windows-based but Zavelson didn’t rule out bringing the feature to “as many OS’s as we can put a very lightweight web app kind on in terms of a smart device or smart TV, that would be the desire”.
Like the other concepts (Luna, Pari and others) that Dell/Alienware revealed this month, Nyx is in its early stages, and Alienware hasn’t said anything concrete about pricing, upgradability or specs. While there is no certainty of Nyx ever coming to market, we can take some solace in knowing mega-corporations sometimes relate to our pain–and will occasionally try to do something about it.
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