One of the things you said in a recent post online was a comment on weight cartridges. My personal opinion on weight cartridge systems is that while I don’t necessarily think that any gamer would be changing the weight on a regular basis, I think it comes down to personal preference and that people should be able to choose how heavy their mouse is.

I totally respect where you’re coming from but my data and all the research I did when coming up with this product indicates that nobody, not a single gamer, wanted a heavy mouse – they wanted the lightest mouse product possible.


I think you’re absolutely right in that you guys have attacked a niche market and done really well for yourselves and people see that in professional gamers. Every event has become a SteelSeries advertisement because so many people use your equipment.

Yeah, I think so. Honestly, we are not more intelligent than Microsoft. We are not more intelligent than Logitech. We are not more intelligent than Razer. The only difference in what we do is we attack our products and design them from the ground up from a completely different perspective. They are trying to make really cool products and then sell them. We are actually going out in the field and asking, “What do you want? How should this function? How should this work?”. This doesn’t make us better or worse, we just have a different philosophy in how we do things.

So how come there aren’t any glowing lights on the Ikari?

As a company we tell everyone that we make sports equipment for gamers. I have never seen Beckham with soccer shoes that glow blue. I have never seen Tiger Woods with a golf club that glows red or green. Would you please tell me when gaming peripherals were designed by the fact that they had glowing lights on them? A gaming peripheral to me is defined by the fact that it gives the user an advantage, gives them a faster reaction time between human and computer, makes them able to perform better in game – it’s not defined by the fact that it glows blue. I completely sympathize with the fact that we are gamers and we want to express that at least on some level, but we do that through our actions not by the fact that we have glowing blue lights in our rooms. I doubt you will ever see a peripheral from SteelSeries that glows blue. We will be implementing LED lights on some of our products but only when they have a function. The SteelKeys 7G will have white LED lights instead of the blue LED lights on the 6G.

Will we ever see a backlit LED keyboard from SteelSeries?

Someday you will. I am confident about that, but when you do you will see that the way we will implement that will be for a reason.

What else can we see out of SteelSeries in the next calendar year?

In the next calendar year, 12 months from now you will see a gaming headset designed for FPS gaming that will completely redefine how we view audio products for gaming. You will see a new mousepad made in cooperation with one of the leading counter-strike players in Sweden. You will see a new keyboard coming out which in my opinion will be THE keyboard. And you will see approximately six or seven hardware products being released in 08.