Winning Is Everything
Five Hardware Characteristics Essential to Gamers
In competitive esports, the difference between winning and losing can come down to milliseconds. A mouse designed for a pro must provide for split-second reaction time.
This level of innovation, though, is a recent development in the gaming space.
“The mouse hadn’t been innovated in quite some time,” said Steve Kang, global category brand director at SteelSeries, a company that has been manufacturing gaming hardware for 20 years and which launched a new line of esports peripherals in May called the Prime Pro Series featuring Prestige OM optical magnetic switches.
With input and feedback from more than 100 of the world’s leading competitive professional players, every aspect of the Prime line was designed meticulously with a single goal in mind: victory. Inspired by the rally car, the Prime franchise introduces a lineup of lightweight, streamlined mice and a new Arctis headset that features only the best-in-class technology. All performance. No extras.
Collaborating with dozens of pros, Kang said, “The innovation was really around finding what people are looking for in their mice and expanding to perfect it. [The mission was] how do we get these distinct, crispy clicks every time you're shooting or executing other actions you need to do to win your game?”
“We've been very serious about who these [pros] are, what they do and how important their game is to them,” added Tino Soelberg, SteelSeries’ chief technology officer and vice president of products. “It’s very different from the guy who sits on the couch and plays a little bit of Call of Duty.”
Speed, of course, is one of several aspects of hardware pros see as critical to their success. Here are four others:
Audio quality
“You need to hear the footsteps behind you.”
That’s a key phrase SteelSeries has heard from pro gamers. Also, being able to hear teammates in the midst of a game’s frantic pace can be essential to victory.
Such pristine audio quality was lacking in early headsets and microphones used by gamers, which were basically either communication headsets like the ones used in call centers or hi-fi grade headsets to which microphones had to be taped.
“When we got into audio, it was combining really high-end audio with really good microphone performance,” said Soelberg. “When you're in a team-based game, communiction is key. The microphone performance was key to us from the very beginning.”
The Arctis line of microphones is designed to be placed at the perfect spot of a gamer’s mouth and also features noise-canceling technology – the same used by flight crews on aircraft carriers.
“When you're telling your teammate exactly where an enemy is on the map, your teammate is going to know exactly what's happening,” said Brian Fallon, senior product manager. “They're going to be able to hear that clearly.”
Durability
After thousands of clicks, a mouse tends to wear out, and the last thing pro gamers want is for their equipment to fail at a crucial moment.
“Think about how fast somebody is clicking a mouse in either a CS: GO game, or even like a League of Legends game. They're just clicking nonstop,” Kang said. “Durability is key for the needs of a pro.”
The same goes for a keyboard. With all those keystrokes, its life may be only so long. Until recently, keyboards used in esports were “basically office keyboards that had gotten a little bit of a makeover,” added Soelberg. “While they're great at typing, after doing the same stuff for a long, long, time, they just die. So, we started digging into an old technology to see how we could we improve the durability.”
To help gamers with speed and durability, SteelSeries, the makers of the first mechanical gaming keyboard, created the OmniPoint switch with fully adjustable actuation. It was the biggest leap in gaming keyboard innovation since the creation of the first mechanical switches.
Comfort
SteelSeries worked with their pros to customize the form of their mice, so that the devices fit to their hands for optimal performance.
“There were millimeters shaved off of the mouse to make sure that it felt right in their hands, because when you're playing for hours and hours, you want to make sure you feel comfortable and the grip is just right as you start to make these fine-tuned movements,” Kang said. “That’s what we've made sure to shape the ergonomics of the Prime line for.”
After hours of play, headsets also present comfort challenges.
“If you take a lot of basic designs, you're going to wear out, you're going to need to take breaks just because your head can't take it,” Fallon said. “That's what led to innovations on the comfort side.”
The Arctis line features an iconic “ski-goggle band,” which is made from elastic fabric and distributes the weight of the set over its user’s head, in contrast to older headbands that build up pressure points.
Simplicity
Pro gamers don’t want to have to think about their gear. They want to make sure that every time they pick it and use it, it gives them the same experience.
A basic two-button design is all that is needed for a mouse in a first-person shooter game. A wired headset alleviates any concern about battery life.
“We’re not putting in any functionality that doesn’t need to be there,” Soelberg said. “There has to be a real, certain need for that functionality. We’ve never been about adding features for the sake of adding features.”
Added Fallon, “The more they're thinking about their gear, the less they're thinking about their game.”
SteelSeries, the worldwide leader in gaming and esports peripherals, recently launched an all-new franchise, co-developed in collaboration with pros, for pros, to win championships. The Prime line is specifically designed for esports.
