4. The Steam games catalog

There may be thousands of games available on Steam, but can they be played on a TV?

Much has been made of the fact that users of the Alienware Alpha will have access to the “thousands of games” available on Steam, which as you know is Valve’s software digital distribution platform for PC games. It’s a bit like the PlayStation Network store with bells and whistles. And it is true that there are literally thousands of games available to purchase and download.

But a large portion of Steam games are not optimized for a large TV display, as they were meant to be played on a monitor screen, which PC gamers typically sit close to. This means that the text size on your glorious HD TV might not be large enough, leading to eye strain, which is obviously not a good thing. And as mentioned earlier in the article, many PC exclusive games such as Legend of Grimrock 2 have no gamepad support, which means you either plug a keyboard and mouse to the Alpha or give up on them. Either way, of the thousands of games available on Steam, only a fraction will be playable from the comfort of your couch.