Alienware has announced that its Steam Machine — the Alienware Alpha — will be available in November for $550. Curiously, though, the Alpha — which should be the first commercially available Steam Machine — won’t ship with Valve’s purpose-built Steam Controller. The Alpha also won’t ship with SteamOS. In fact, the Alienware Alpha is basically just a mid-spec Windows 8.1 PC that boots straight into Steam Big Picture Mode. Considering Steam Machines were meant to usher in a new era of Linux-based living room game consoles, with a magical gamepad that makes PC games playable from your couch, what exactly is Alienware playing at?

Back at CES 2014 in January, Alienware was one of 12 hardware partners to show off prototype Steam Machine hardware. Unfortunately, though, not a whole lot has happened in the Steam Machine universe since then. Development of SteamOS, a custom build of Linux that boots straight into Steam’s Big Picture Mode, continues slowly. The revolutionary Steam Controller, which was meant to make it possible to play PC games from your couch (including RTSes!), continues to evolve — first it lost its touchscreen, and a more recent prototype has an analog stick instead of a D-pad. In May, after some six months of closed beta testing of the original Steam Machine prototype, Valve said that the official Steam Machine release date had been pushed back from 2014 to some point in 2015.

Clearly, Steam Machines — which were meant to launch throughout 2014 — are in trouble.

While Valve’s other hardware partners are seemingly waiting patiently for the finalized SteamOS and Steam Controller, Alienware has decided to simply forge ahead and launch its own approximation of the Steam Machine. The Alpha, which looks a lot like any other black game console, is essentially a standard Windows 8.1 PC. The Alpha will come with a bundled Xbox 360 wireless gamepad, but the Xbox One gamepad should also be supported by launch. Alienware has designed its own custom interface for setting up the Alpha and opening Steam so that you don’t ever have to see the Windows 8 Metro or Desktop interfaces. (You do have the option of booting to the Desktop and using the Alpha like a standard PC, however.)

The standard Alienware Alpha, which costs $550, will net you a dual-core Core-i3 with 4GB of RAM, 500GB hard drive, and some kind of custom-built Maxwell-based Nvidia GPU. With the Alpha essentially being a Dell PC, though, there are of course other options available: If you’re willing to spend $900 on a glorified living room PC, you can have an Alpha with a quad-core Core-i7 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and a 2TB hard drive. There’s scant few details on the GPU being used in any of the Alpha’s configurations, but Alienware says that the $550 model should run most games on Medium.

In other words, the Alienware Alpha is basically a very expensive game console. With the standard Xbox 360 gamepad, you won’t be using the Alpha to play PC-specific genres — rather, you’ll just be playing PC ports of console games. The Alpha kind of makes sense if you’re also looking for some kind of home theater PC or always-on hub for torrenting and network-attached storage — but really, I don’t think it’s worth the trade-off. You might as well just run a long HDMI cable from your bedroom/office PC to your living room TV, or wait until they add some more media centerish features to the Xbox One and PS4.

As for what this means for the larger SteamOS/Steam Machine ecosystem, we’ll just have to wait and see. As far as we know, Valve would still love to break away from Windows — though, to be honest, it’s in no real rush to do so. It also isn’t entirely clear how Valve will make its Linux-based SteamOS more desirable than Windows for gaming. Perhaps with the unofficial release of the Source 2 engine last week we might soon see some big news — Half-Life 3 or L4D3, exclusive to SteamOS — but I doubt it somehow.