Alienware to launch Steam Box minus Valve OS

SteamOS has been dropped from Alienware’s upcoming mini gaming PC range in favour of Windows.

The Steam Box will launch at the end of this year with a $550 price tag. But absent from the device are both the Steam OS and controller.

Alienware will instead ship its offering with an Xbox 360 controller and an adapter that provides connectivity for up to four of the pads. It will also run all games at 1080p at 60fps.

The decision to launch the device minus these core Steam components is a compromise between Alienware and Valve following the latter’s decision to delay its Steam Machines until 2015.

But it’s far from a divorce between the two firms as Alienware has said it will include both the Steam OS and controller to its devices as they launch.

"They’re fully supportive. Funny enough, we have Valve sitting back there in our meetings. We’ve been working with Valve for the past two years on this living room initiative. We fully support – they didn’t feel the OS and the controller were ready, so they pushed it. Fully support them," Bryan de Zayas, global marketing director at Alienware told Joystiq.