Alienware Rigs Have Steam, Portal Pre-Installed

By Kevin Parrish
published

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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Kevin Parrish
26 Comments Comment from the forums
  • ubernoobie
    Steam > all internet game distrubitors just cuz it got source
    Reply
  • cryogenic
    Microsoft should bundle Steam with Windows, one less vital application to set up :)

    Reply
  • rodney_ws
    If Steam would just let me give my old games to friends it would be PERFECT!
    Reply
  • mcreskiller
    Steam is ftw, i have bought all my recent games off it its just more convinent dont need to worry abotu loosing disks or anything
    Reply
  • Gin Fushicho
    Steam = HATE. I cant use most any games I buy from them unless i'm connected to the internet. An Since I use the internet at the Library... I'm not.
    Reply
  • AtuBrian
    rodney_wsIf Steam would just let me give my old games to friends it would be PERFECT!agreed
    Reply
  • mickey21
    No, it wouldnt be perfect if you could give your old games away, but it would be better. There are so many times the steam client will fail to login, fail to load properly, or fail to update correctly. There are many times it will say the game is unavailable, when you just exited the game. There are many things wrong with it making it far from perfect.

    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...
    Reply
  • Complement, not compliment.
    Reply
  • the_krasno
    Simply sell your old account and use the spare money to rebuy the games you didn't wanted to sell, silly!
    Reply
  • the_krasno
    Gin FushichoSteam = HATE. I cant use most any games I buy from them unless i'm connected to the internet. An Since I use the internet at the Library... I'm not.
    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.
    Reply