TALKING TECH
We talk to Razer’s Ruben Mookerjee about VR, streaming, and the future of gaming peripherals
We talk to Razer about VR.
Two areas of PC gaming have taken off like no other: virtual reality and streaming. With the explosive success of Twitch taking millions of hours of our time online, it was inevitable that companies would capitalize on this demand, and as VR makes its way to market, we have to ask, is this a good thing? We speak to Razer to see what its stance is, and what products it’s releasing to encourage these enthusiastic and expansive sectors of gaming. Maximum PC: We’re here with Ruben Mookerjee, Razer’s general manager and vice president of User Interfaces and Gaming Peripherals. Wow— what a title! So, can you tell us a little about what inspired Razer to develop the Ripsaw? Ruben Mookerjee: That’s a good question. We realized, actually a couple of years ago, that there was this whole sort of meta community around gaming: people who are watching people who are gaming. And so, you know, it started off with people doing video blogs on YouTube and stuff, and since Twitch has really taken off now, people are watching live streams and interacting with people as they’re playing games, so we realized the whole sort of broadcaster segment was actually pretty interesting. And a lot of them were spontaneously using our headsets, our mice, and our keyboards. So we started looking at what we could do to augment the suite of products you need in order to be a broadcaster—and to be clear, it’s not the thousands of people out there who are already broadcasting that we’re targeting, it’s the millions of people who are watching those broadcasts who equally feel as though they’ve got something to say. We are trying to sort of demystify the process of being able to sort of get out there—and the Razer Ripsaw is our first step toward it.
It’s part of a suite of products. We also have the Razer Seiren, which has been out for over a year now—we have a USB version, and an XLR balanced output version of the Seiren. Then, on top of that, we have a new product, which was announced last year and should be shipping in a few weeks’ time, which is the Razer Stargazer. The Stargazer is our depthsensing webcam, so combined with the Ripsaw and the Seiren, it means you can have borderless picture-in-picture overlays on top of the game stream, which gives it a very professional output. MPC: Can you expand a little on how Razer sees streaming, and where that’s going? RM: We’ve been sponsoring and supporting streamers for a long time; in fact, there are over 70,000 Razer-sponsored streamers today. They’re not people we give money to, but we support them with products and with news, and with help and support, and in return, their fans purchase our headphones, and our mice and keyboards, and products like
Seiren and Ripsaw to do their own streaming, and it’s really to sort of give something back. We’re a company of gamers for gamers. We’re as enthusiastic about supporting the community as we are about selling products to the community, because that’s the business we’re in. And going forward, we see it as a growing market. I mean, like a lot of people have got something really interesting to say, and they’re not all tech wizards, so the ability to sort of try and intercept a video feed and mix it in with a broadcast is actually pretty complicated, so we’re just trying to demystify that part of it, so that really anyone can go out and play games they like, and see if they can pick it up. MPC: OSVR was one of your big announcements last year—can you give us more detail about how that’s been developing? RM: Well, it’s a very exciting time. I mean, “VR” is really the buzzword. You probably find the same thing—people from outside the industry going, “Oh, VR, VR, VR!” and many of them just can’t grasp the differences between Google Cardboard and Oculus, and they’re two completely different ends of the cost spectrum, let alone the visibility spectrum. So OSVR—the head-mounted display, which we call our Hacker Development Kit—is only part of it, and really the goal behind OSVR is the API layer that lives underneath it, because our goal is to provide an open platform, so that game developers can gain the confidence today that they can develop games around the OSVR API, and they know that in the future, as new products come out, they’ll automatically have support. Just like if you write a mouse and keyboard game today, you don’t have to write it around a particular brand of mouse and keyboard; you just write that in, and that’s where we want to get to. Because the nightmare scenario for us—and for industry watchers and game developers—is that if the VR hardware gets too tribal, and you have an Oculus camp and a Vive camp, and you have games written for one and not the other, then we’ll rapidly end up in a sort of Betamax versus VHS platform support war, which will be crazy, and one thing that will do is put consumers off altogether. So, as an industry, we need to stop that happening, and OSVR was our contribution to try and do that. We’ve already got some big-name partners, like Intel, and Nvidia and AMD, who are partners in OSVR, and we’re hoping to get some more peripheral manufacturers— my direct competitors— involved as well, just to try and ensure some crosscompatibility in standards for the future, so you can buy a piece of hardware today and be confident it’s going to be supported in the games of tomorrow. And, more to the point, that the games written today will support the peripherals that haven’t even been developed yet. MPC: So it’s less about competing with the likes of SteelSeries and Logitech, and more just working together to make the whole virtual reality scene accessible? RM: Exactly. I mean, obviously I’m very proud of my products, and I’m confident that any given product is better than the Logitech or SteelSeries equivalent—that goes without saying. I’m sure if you had a Logitech person here, they’d say the same about their products. But the thing we all know and we all agree on is that we need a certain amount of stability, so that consumers are not scared off investing in the platform at all, and that’s what we’re trying to work together to do.