Alienware Rigs Have Steam, Portal Pre-Installed
Dell is pre-installing Valve's Steam service and Portal on Alienware desktops and laptops.
Valve announced earlier this week that Dell is pre-installing the Steam service on its Alienware rigs including the Area-51 and Aurora desktops, and the M17x and M15x laptops. In addition to Steam, the rigs will also come pre-installed with a free copy of Valve's Portal PC game.
"With its automatic game updates, easy friend finding and the ability to play your Steam purchased games on any PC, Valve has helped simplify PC Gaming to make it more enjoyable." says Frank Azor, Senior Manager of Product Planning for Dell's Gaming Group. "It's for these reasons; we selected Steam to compliment the Alienware experience."
It's not uncommon to see pre-install game services on name-brand laptops and notebooks. HP offers a pre-installed PC games console that provides demos of popular titles from Atari, Popcap, and WildTangent Studios. The HP Games PC Console is currently available on Pavilion, Compaq Presario, and Media Center desktop PCs.
Still, Valve's presence on Alienware products may spark more debate from other publishers. Recently Randy Pitchford slammed Valve, saying he didn't trust the company, and went so far as to saying that it would be dangerous to the rest of the industry "to allow Valve to win." Other digital services have banned games on their virtual store shelves for embedding Steam within the software.
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agreed
Do I use it, yes, do I love it, no. Is it the best one, well not the best, but it has one of the largest games listing to choose from so it has that. Would I use another if I was able to, yes, absolutely yes if I had the same choice of games to buy, I would choose another in a heartbeat. It is unfortunate they are the market leader right now. There is so much they need to fix. But I guess that comes with being popular...
1-You can use offline mode. Internet is only needed to download the game.
2-You don't have Internet at your home? Then I'm rather surprised your first priority is to play games over having Internet.
If they had bothered to pre-install the entire Half-Life 1 & 2 package, it would be something worth noting. But this is not. It's just a FREE app you could download yourself and a cheap game. Is it possible it's just Portal: First Slice, which is actually a free download, too?
I'm not impressed - Not one bit. Try again, Dell, I mean Alienware =P
And why should i even care if on PC's worth hundreds of € they bundle Portal....
But ASUS and Sager make more appeasing gaming laptops (not as sexy, but a lot cheaper).
I think that's why Valve is pushing steam so much- they are trying to save PC gaming
^^^what an idiot.
If that were the case every company (and all of them do) that sold a computer with a pre-installed piece of software would get sued. If you don't like it uninstall and quit your whining.
Especially OS'es. But games too.
I don't want to pay the increase in price that will occur due to the seller having to buy a license or licenses, and the increased setup cost. Unless, that is, Valve gave it away to them for free (which smells a little anti-competitive).
Secondly, I also do not want to have to remove unwanted software from the get-go. Well, if I weren't planning on formatting everything, I would care.
Lastly, it's anti-competitive. End result: games will be worse (on average) than they would if competition were stronger.
But then the EU will make them create a dialog to allow users to choose which client they want so that other smaller companies get to freeload.