Gamers love AI in game dev — they just don’t know it yet, says Razer’s CEO

We’re back to start the year off with a very special live interview with Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan, which we taped in front of a terrific audience at Brooklyn Bowl in Las Vegas during CES. 

Razer is obviously best known for making mice, keyboards, and gaming PCs in its signature black and bright green, with a smattering of RGB LEDs to set everything off. But the company always makes splashy announcements at CES, and this year was no different — and along with the hype, there was plenty of controversy.

This year, Razer earned those splashy headlines and more than a little controversy for something it calls Project Ava, an AI companion that has a physical presence in the real world as an anime hologram that sits in a jar on your desk. Ava is powered by, you guessed it, Elon Musk’s Grok. 

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There are a lot of choices bundled up in all of that, and Razer can’t really fall back on the “it’s just a prototype” defense. It’s taking $20 “reservations” and entirely expects to ship this thing, potentially even this year. So I spent a good chunk of time in this interview asking Min some very obvious questions, to which I’m not sure I got very satisfying answers.

I really wanted to know if Min and Razer had really thought through the implications of building AI companions, after a string of stories detailing the mental health issues chatbots have caused for so many people. And of course, I wanted to know why Min and Razer had chosen Grok, which is facing outrage around the world for allowing users to create deepfaked pornographic images of real women and children.

Min says they chose Grok for its conversational capabilities. But he was also not very convinced by the notion that products like this always end up being turned into creepy sexual objects, despite an entire year of headlines about AI psychosis and people turning chatbots into romantic partners. 

That exchange really set the tone for the rest of my conversation with Min, which focused on why exactly he’s pushing Razer so hard into AI when it does not seem at all clear that the core gamer demographic wants any of this. The gaming community at large has been absolutely rocked by the AI art debate that’s ripped through the broader industry in the past 12 months, with concerns over labor, copyright, and even just experimental AI use in game development putting some of the industry’s most beloved studios into full-blown crisis mode.

Gamers themselves are fairly hostile toward AI, which you can see in the comments on Razer’s own CES AI posts. So I asked Min about that, and how he would know if he had made the right bet here in the face of all this pushback.

As you can tell, there was a lot of back and forth here, and this was a really good conversation. Min and I really dug into some of the biggest issues in tech and gaming, themes that are going to be central throughout 2026. It’s also great to do these kinds of episodes live in front of an audience. I think it’s going to give you a lot to think about. 

Okay: Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan. Here we go.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Hello, welcome to Decoder. I’m Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I’m talking with Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan. Welcome, Min.

Thank you for having me. 

Nailed it. Thank you to our audience. We are live at Brooklyn Bowl at CES. I’m very excited to be doing this in front of a live audience. You’re going to hear them throughout the show because Min has no shortage of extremely controversial things to say.

We’ll see, we’ll see.

I was promised “extremely controversial.”

Oh, is that right?

I mean, that’s what they told me. Let’s get into it. You’ve made a bunch of announcements here at CES. You’ve obviously been with Razer for a long time. You founded Razer, and you’re over 20 years into the job. The gaming industry is undergoing a lot of turmoil lately because of AI. You’re making huge investments in AI. There’s a hologram waifu we should talk about that you’ve introduced throughout the show.

I actually wanna start with something very basic. I’ve been covering CES for about 20 years as well. Razer loves CES. You love CES.

We love it.

Every year, there is a huge suite of Razer products announced. There are weird projects and concepts. Why are you so invested in CES? Of all the companies, I think Razer has the most consistent enthusiasm for this show in particular.

It’s odd, and we were just talking about it yesterday. It’s over 20 years at this point in time, and I think we’ve been at CES maybe 15 years or so. And from the very early days at Razer, I remember Pepcom, a massive hall with a little table there, talking about gaming products. Back then, I think we were probably one of the few, if not the only, gaming equipment providers.

It’s really grown for us. I think what has happened is we have a huge online community, people are very passionate about things that we come up with, what’s the latest and greatest, and we’ve really grown this community, and we have all been kind of invested in what we’re gonna be launching at CES. So it kind of started a couple of years ago when we said, “Okay, why don’t we not just bring the stuff that we’re gonna launch, but some of the things that we’ve got cooking in the Razer labs and stuff.”

We brought it to CES, it has been a hit, and we said every year, “Why don’t we bring more of our concept products? Some of which will come to market, some of which do not, and let’s see what the community thinks.” So we’re a company that is for gamers, by gamers. We really like to hear what the community would like to say about our product, and it gives us an opportunity to present the stuff that we’ve got, get the feedback, and then we go back and polish it a little bit.

Well, I’m curious. I mean, this is kind of a meta question about how this show in particular has changed so much over the years. The idea of even having a big tech trade show has gone in and out of favor. If you look at where a lot of the action is this week in Vegas, it’s actually in the Aria and Vdara, where the ad tech people are doing whatever weird stuff they’re doing. I don’t even know what’s going on over there, man. It’s goofy. 

This is about getting attention, right? I mean, you launch things at trade shows because the press and creators are here, and you can get a lot of attention. Razer doesn’t need help getting attention. Why still do it here?

Well, it’s an opportunity, I think, for us also to catch up with our partners, friends, and show a little bit of what we have been working on under the hood. But it’s been a tradition of sorts. I think the community expects us to be here. I’d love to see more of these in-person events right now, especially post-pandemic, and what has happened.

From a gaming perspective, we’ve also lost a couple of big events in the year. So it’s a great way to kind of kick it off. It’s a little early in the year for us, though. We wish it would be maybe mid-January or something like that. But it’s a bit of a tradition for us. I hope it continues, I hope it gets bigger along the way, and it’s massive right now. But it’s good fun.

Do you think you’re still getting the same amount of attention from this kind of thing as you would if you just had your own events?

Well, we have our own events, pretty much, but it’s a good opportunity just to catch up with partners. I think that’s been a real opportunity for us. And it’s also a good opportunity for us to kind of bring the rest of our audience along, from the gaming community, who may not necessarily be keen so much on all tech, but they really wanna see what’s the latest and greatest in gaming tech. And that’s what we do.

So let me ask you about the announcements here. There’s an AI headset called Project Motoko.

Yes.

You’ve got AI PCs for software developers, which is really interesting. I wanna talk to you about that. And then there’s Project Ava, which is a spinning hologram.

Yes. We’ve got Madison also, which is a project that we’ve brought across, which showcases the latest and greatest in immersion technology. We’ve put it into a gaming chair, so that’s a setup for games.

I can’t believe I forgot the chair. The most important.

Yeah, the chair, it’s getting a lot of traction. And a whole lot more, and not just hardware, but software.

So how do you decide what is going to be a real product you’re gonna ship? The AI PCs, I think, are real products you’re definitely gonna ship. That’s just happening. And then here’s the concept, just to get attention and feedback. How do you make that kind of choice?

Actually, we’ve got a labs team internally, which charts and pretty much looks at things far out, in terms of the industry, where we think the industry’s going, and how we can build toward that. In essence, the decision to green-light a project to an actual product is really like, “Is this cool? Do we think it’s gonna do well?” We kind of started with that, with the gaming mouse, right?

We very rarely sit down with the finance people and say, “Oh, do we do projections and things like that?” It’s really more of a “by the seat of our pants” kind of thing. It’s cool, we like it, it’s gonna be fun, we want it for ourselves. I think the real kind of trigger there is, do we want it for ourselves? And if we really want it for ourselves, and we think it’s cool, we’ll bring it to market.

Every year, there’s always some project; some of them come out, some of them don’t come out. One year, you announced a respirator that got you into a lot of trouble, and you had to recall the product. How do you make the call of, “Okay, this project, it’s out, it’s successful, it’s doing what we want it to do, we’re gonna keep investing,” versus “this was a one-off.” What’s the metric of success there?

Well, scaling it. I think scaling it is definitely something that we would like to do. And sometimes we’re really early. For example, I think over a decade ago we built a complete gaming PC in a handheld. For that matter, we brought it to market at the same time. Today, we’ve seen handhelds out there, and we haven’t launched our handheld, for example, at this point.

Do you have one?

We might. We will see. But not today.

So you got claps for that already.

I think for us, when we launch a product, we look at the attraction for it. You know, is this something that we want? Do we wanna invest in the next generation? Do we wanna kind of provide a roadmap across to it? So we essentially work very closely with the community.

We keep talking about “for gamers, by gamers,” but we really believe in that. We’ve got a really big fan base that’s very passionate. Everyone’s got an opinion. We love hearing opinions. We’ve got social media, we chat with them often, so on and so forth. That’s what really guides us, and we really let the community guide what we build for the future.

All right, so now I have to ask you about Project Ava.

Sure.

Did you say to your team, “I want a holographic anime waifu on my desk”? You say that the metric is “what we want.” Who was like, “I want this”?

Sure. So actually, yeah, somewhat. Well, not so much in the specific words, “I want an anime waifu,” and things like that. But we did hack together a holographic projector to have a character there. We had ideas like that in the past, where we’ve created holographic projectors for game companies. But back in the day, to say, “Hey, look, is there a way that we can do a holographic representation of some of your latest characters?” and stuff like that. 

With AI, we were now able to get that personality there and have conversational AI coming through. I think the tipping point for us was really not just making great hardware, and not just having great software, but also, now with great intelligence, I think, coming out together with it. And it’s that premise of being able to have a semi-physical representation of an avatar, to me being able to chat, as opposed to clicking a button or typing on something, and having a little thing over there. 

It’s really exciting in our imaginations for ourselves, you know? It’s cool. We’ve always had that, whether it’s a game like a super AI in Halo, like Cortana, for example. So it’s a little bit of sci-fi, us growing up always wanting something cool like that, and so we said, “Hey, it’s a great concept,” and I think the community loves it.

Are you aware of the very common trope about actually building superintelligence from sci-fi movies? The one that’s “you should not build the Torment Nexus?”

Well, for us, I think in this case it’s more… Well, I’m familiar with that, of course.

[Laughs] Just checking.

Yeah, yeah. But, I mean, with the guardrails… That is also, I think, on a broader level, from an AI discussion and things like that, trust and safety is one of the things that we do look at internally at the company. But specifically for Ava, it was just cool. It was just awesome to be able to have a product like that, and hopefully we will.

So is Ava going to come out? Because I think that my understanding, or my reaction to this product, changes based on whether it’s actually coming out or if this is just a concept that people can react to. But you’re taking pre-orders for it. It’s like 20 bucks to pre-order it.

Yes, we’re taking reservations for it at this point in time.

It seems like it’s going to come out.

We plan to put it out, but we do want to get as much feedback, to hear what the concerns are, right? Are there things that we can do better? What’s cool? What are the characters that we would like to get on? We’d also like to get the feedback from many of the game partners, at the same time, to do really specific character models, so on and so forth. And then finally, I think on the trust and safety part, we also wanna make sure that we take that into consideration. Are there things that we need to know? We’re working with our model partners at the same time.

So the model partner with Ava is Grok.

Yes.

I would say that there’s a pretty significant disconnect between saying you care about trust and safety and partnering with Grok, which is in the middle of a deepfake porn scandal. As we speak, as we’re sitting here, Grok is undressing people left and right. I’m confident that we will be undressed by the end of this podcast.

But Grok has the best–

Can you care about trust and safety, and also partner with Grok?

Well, I think for Grok, you know… We picked Grok also because it’s got the best conversational AI at this point, for us. At least from a conversation, personality side of things, and that’s one of the things that we looked at from a tech perspective. Now, ultimately, however, we do see Ava as an open platform, right? If somebody wants to be able to use a different model, it’s one of the things that we’re taking into consideration. And we are multi-model, right? But I think from a perspective of an avatar, from a conversational AI for CES, we feel that Grok has a really great conversational AI model at this point. So that’s one of the reasons why we picked Grok.

Grok, also made by Elon Musk, who has his own anime waifu ideas, I would say. There’s something there that is, you know, not necessarily just trust and safety. The idea that you would have a pet on your desk that looks like a person, that can talk to you, that’s a big door to open for a lot of people. Are you worried about that at all?

Well, the doors have been open since Tamagotchi.

I think there’s a pretty big step difference between… Like my daughter has a Tamagotchi. I’m never worried that this thing is alive.

Right.

The Tamagotchi has not driven anyone into psychosis.

Sure. But from a virtual perspective, and as a gamer, we’ve interacted with NPCs and stuff like that. And of course, NPCs are getting smarter with AI, and I do hope they get smarter. It gets more engaging. And I think we’re still in the early days. Now, the question, I think, where it’s going to lead to is something that we need to discover, right? And, of course, we need to discover it in a responsible manner to figure out how we do that, and put the right guardrails in. What do we do in terms of AI, in terms of this? That’s something that we’re learning. 

So building great hardware, I think, is part of it. Grok is powering this for us at this point in time, and this is something that we feel, from a conversational perspective, they do an incredible job at. Now, over and above what else can we do to ensure that, ultimately, when we do launch the product, how do we make sure that it’s going to do the right things and be able to converse and be the great companion that we want it to be?

This is very much what I mean by saying I react to it differently when it’s just a concept, and it opens the door to these conversations, versus you are going to sell this thing to people. And I think when you sell it to people, the responsibility skyrockets. We’ve all looked at what’s happened with OpenAI models over the last year or so. People have fallen in love with them. Famously, Bing proposed to journalist Kevin Roose on the front page of The New York Times. People are having relationships with these products. They are being driven to very negative outcomes. 

Do you think that you have to do something else to make sure that doesn’t happen with Ava, who will be represented in human-like form on your desk? Like the opportunity to have a relationship is gonna change, right? And from what I have been told, from our reporters, Razer people are saying, “We don’t want this to be a companion in that way.” OpenAI said that about ChatGPT, and yet, here we are. So what have you learned from that already?

So we work closely with the model providers. I think this is something that we work closely on with them, with respect to that. We do talk to them often about what the plans are for the future, with respect to this. But I think what is clear is that these are still early days, right? It is still new for us to discover. I’m sure that there will be concerns or issues that will come about, and evolving what’s happening for technology is something that we do. 

Now, maybe it’s even a hardware lock that we need to put in. We don’t know, right? Or it’s more software guardrails that we have to put into place at this point in time. That’s one of the reasons why we decided to put it as a concept first out there, to get the feedback. And we’re not gonna be able to think of everything, but we would like to be able to get as much thought, concern, and care into the product before we actually launch it, which is why we’ve also intentionally, in a very intentional and deliberate manner, said, “We don’t know when we’re gonna launch this.” We really do not. 

I would suspect, for us, it will be a phased approach to a certain extent, with dev kits out there first to be able to discover more. Someone’s gonna be able to do more with it, perhaps, to load up different models and to have it say things that we may not necessarily want it to say, and we’ll find out. And then, accordingly, we’ll just grow the product.

I understand all this, but you’re taking the money, right? You’re taking the pre-orders. Why take pre-orders if you don’t think you’re ready?

So what we have actually said is that these are reservations. They’re not pre-orders, per se. So, ultimately, when we do launch the product, and it could be a long way out, by then, because of the specs… We have not disclosed the actual specs of the product, and even, for example, which character models, or even which model it’s gonna be running at this point in time. We’re leaving that absolutely open. 

And of course, at the end of the day, if somebody says, “Look, this isn’t the product that I thought it was going to be,” that’s fine. Cancel the reservation, and we’ll remain open and see how the product evolves at that point in time.

Are you ready for a customer, a few years from now, falling in love with their hologram on your desk that you have provided?

I don’t think that’s how we would want to design the product.

It’s going to happen.

We don’t know.

That’s what happens with all these tools.

I suppose we literally do not know, right? I use the example when I play a game, and I’m really invested in the game, I really enjoy it, and I feel a sense of loss… Well, I wouldn’t call it unhappiness, but loss when I finish a game. But it’s a great game. I’m fully invested in a movie, I’m fully invested in a game. Is that how we see it? Perhaps, right? 

We want to create products that people care about, whether that’s a gaming mouse, a laptop, or whatever software platforms. We want people to care about it. I don’t necessarily think that we want somebody to fall in love with one of our products and marry them. It might happen. Who knows? It could.

There are other CEOs who come on this show, they’re like, “You should marry my AI,” and straightforwardly say these things to me.

Really?

All the time.

Okay.

The reality is, some people are having their romantic lives rocked because a cloud service got deprecated, and then you’re gonna have to deal with that. I’m just saying, these are the questions that are coming for you once you put a character that people can have an emotional relationship with.

Well, I would say that potentially that could happen, but that’s definitely not something we plan to build the product toward. I mean, we have, for example, people really passionate about Razer products, right? Some of them have come to me, and they have said, “Look, I’m so passionate about this product, it’s part of my life. I’m gonna tattoo the product on myself,” and things like that. We didn’t plan to do that. 

But we did, however, plan to make the best possible product. We put incredible amounts of care and concern, I think, in terms of design. And that’s what we plan to do with Ava at the same time, or Motoko, or Madison, or any of the products that we bring to the market.

One more question on this, and then I’m gonna ask you the Decoder questions and talk about the rest of your AI investment, which is pretty substantial. You said you’re working with the model partners, and that is how you’re thinking about trust and safety. Is xAI a good partner when it comes to trust and safety, as it relates to Grok? Because I’m looking at the product you’re shipping today, and I would say, “No.”

Sure. So I think, and I speak broadly, I think, for all of the partners that we’ve got. I think for the vast majority of all the models out there, I think there’s, of course, a lot of focus in terms of intelligence, really trying to get to that point, but trust and safety really is one of the things that pretty much all our partners really do care about. And that’s one of the reasons why… Each model, I think, excels in different ways at the same time. And I think for us, we really wanna find the best possible model. And ultimately, in what shape or form we ship at the end of the day, that’s one of the things that we will take into consideration.

Is xAI a good partner when it comes to trust and safety?

Specifically, I don’t really like to comment on that at this point in time because I don’t have enough information, I think, right now. I really don’t. My focus to date has been more in terms of what’s the best conversational model that we’ve got, and they’re great, they’re fantastic.

Again, I suspect we’ll be undressed within the next 45 minutes. They’ve got one idea, and they’re good at it.

Let me ask you the Decoder questions. If you’ve got a trick, you gotta play the hits, you know? Let me ask the Decoder questions ’cause I think that’s gonna lead into some of the big investments you’re making, and the change that’s coming to Razer as a company over the next few years. You’re really invested in design. You’re a product designer, that’s some of your background. How is Razer structured in a way that lets you stay focused on design?

So I focus on product at the company. We’ve got a really pretty flat structure at Razer. I’ve got about 40, 50 direct reports. We really work as a team. And the entire company is really focused, I think, in terms of product first. You know, that has always been the mantra for the organization, but we’ve got a really great team, very talented team members. And everyone has worked together for a while. We’ve got team members who have been there for the last 20 years together with us, growing alongside us.

I would say that the guiding north star for us is just about the gamers. We’ve been consistent in that respect, despite the fact that in the very early days, gaming or gamers were not considered a big industry or demographic. But we’ve been laser-focused in terms of that as we’ve grown. Even with the industry growing at this point in time, the opportunities for us to go like, “Hey, why don’t you do productivity at the same time? Why don’t we go into this other area?” And stuff like that. We’ve just said, “Look, we know what we’re good at.” We remain focused on it. We align the team members all the time, and that’s how we are structured.

How many people are at Razer?

About 2000.

When I say structure, I mean literally organized. Does everybody report to you? Where do all those 2000 people go?

No. In the traditional structure, we’ve got our operations and supply chain. We’ve got legal, so on and so forth. But we’ve got a pretty flat, I think, management team structure, and we don’t have multiple layers from that perspective. And we consistently keep a very single-minded focus to say that, “Look, the product’s always the most important. The customer, in our case, the gamer, is always the most important for us.” And pretty much we ask ourselves the question, right? If there’s no direction or management mandate when it comes down to this, just figure it out. Like, what would the customer want, what would the gamer want? That’s what we do.

You’re primarily based in Singapore. I know you come back and forth a lot. Where is most of the company based?

Well, we’re everywhere. A third of our business is in the US, a third in Europe, and a third in Asia at this point in time. So we’ve got team members spread out. We’ve got close to 20 offices worldwide. We’re dual headquartered in Irvine and Singapore.

When I think about the market of gamers, we’re here, obviously, in the United States. It’s very obviously focused on what this market wants. Gaming is growing in China at a high rate, right? We’re adding more gamers in other places. When you say, “We’re focused on the gamers,” the gamers in different regions want different things. How do you make those decisions? How do you decide which needs are gonna drive your roadmaps or your design ideas?

Exactly that. You know, the gamers from, or the needs from, every country or region that we’ve got… We’ve got team members from design in each of the various regions, and we do focus on pretty much two constituents, the way that we see it. The first of which would be the game developers. That’s who we work with, very closely with. And then on the other end of the spectrum, we’ve got the gamers. And what we do is focus on what the gamers want, what the game developers want, and we see ourselves as the link in between. And we keep both as happy as we can.

This brings me to the other Decoder question I ask everybody on the show. How do you make decisions? Do you have a framework? Do you have an organized way of making decisions?

I think we are dictated by what we feel the customer wants. That’s what dictates our decisions at any point in time. We talk to the gamers, and when we say “talk to the gamers,” it could be directly through social media, it could be through our customer base, it could be through our sales and marketing team, and things like that. And anecdotally, we figure out, is this what we want? And if this is something that they are keen or passionate about, we then make the decision to say, “Okay, cool.” And we have a very quick, flexible, and… We’re very nimble, I would say, at Razer, wherein we try to do as little as possible, but to scale as fast as possible just for our customer base.

This is gonna lead me to the big decision. You have announced you’re investing $600 million into AI over the next few years. You’re gonna hire 150 AI engineers, I think. The gamers hate it. The gamers, I think, are in open revolt against AI coming into their games, into their platforms. Certainly, developers are very worried about what’s gonna happen to software development. We’ve seen game studios rocked by AI. 

That’s a pretty big disconnect. Even, I think, in the announcement of the CES tag line for Razer at CES, which is, “AI is the future of gaming.” I looked at the Instagram comments. If you’re listening to the gamers, you’d be like, “Well, we’re done with this.” How are you reconciling that gap?

So, I would say that the question is, “What are we unhappy with?” When I say we, I mean us as gamers. I think we’re unhappy with generative AI slop, right? Just to put it out there. And that’s something that I’m unhappy with. Like any gamer, when I play a game, I want to be engaged, I wanna be immersed, I wanna be able to be competitive. I don’t want to be served character models with extra fingers and stuff like that, or shoddily written storylines, so on and so forth. I think for us, we’re all aligned against gen AI slop that is just churned out from a couple of prompts and stuff like that.

What we aren’t against, at least, from my perspective, are tools that help augment or support, and help game developers make great games. And I think that’s fundamentally what we are talking about at Razer, right? So if we’ve got AI tools that can help game developers QA their games faster, better, and weed out the bugs, I think, along the way, we’re all aligned, and we would love that. If we could get game developers to have the opportunity to create better, to check through typos and things like that, to create better games, I think we all want that. So I think that’s the way that we see it.

One of the things that we’re building, for example, at Razer is what we call a QA companion. So QA tends to be an expensive endeavor. Like the gamer doesn’t see it at the end of the day, but it can take up like 30 to 40 percent of the cost, or delay games for the longest time. Now, what we’ve done is create a companion, a tool that works with the human QA tester to be able to automatically fill in forms, to say, “Okay, if this is…” Say the form is a Jira ticket, to say “this is a bug that is identified, there’s a graphical bug, there’s a performance bug.” All that’s logged very quickly, so it’s sent to the developer at the same time. The developer then can go in and say, “Okay, this is how I’ll fix the bug,” or, “These are suggestions on how I fix the bug.”

The way that we see it is that AI is a tool to help game developers make better games. In this case, rather than replacing human creativity — and that’s something I personally feel very passionately about — we want to figure out how we use AI in the gaming industry to get AI to do things better. In the broader scheme of things, I think that’s what we have been focused on. But there are other reasons why I think gamers are unhappy with AI, and I agree with them. I don’t like slop either, right? That’s one. Two, is it raising the cost of RAM? It is also raising the cost of RAM. I don’t like that at the same time. 

Back in the day, there was the GPUs versus crypto situation and things like that, and this is the same thing. So I do think, however, that all gamers would love better games, more fun games, more engaging games, and if AI can help create that by doing better QA, I mean, I’m all for it.

I want to poke at that a little bit harder, but let me just ask you: is Razer feeling the RAM crunch and the GPU crunch like everybody else?

Oh, yes, absolutely. Because we make laptops and things like that. 

How badly has that affected you?

I mean, we haven’t announced the prices for the next round of laptops, for example, and this is something that concerns me because the RAM prices are going up, and we want to be able to make sure our laptops remain affordable and within the reach of gamers out there. But it has been moving. It is such a volatile situation at this point in time that it’s hard for us to even figure out what the pricing is at this junction.

Do you think you’ll be able to pick a number and be confident in that number by the time the laptops have to come out?

I don’t know if I can pick a number right now as I speak with you, and by the end of the podcast.

Yeah, that’s bad.

It is bad. It is bad right now.

You have competitors in the PC industry like Apple, Microsoft, and others. They can move their margins around. They have services, businesses, and stuff that attach to these laptops. Maybe they’ll take a hit on the RAM because you’re gonna have to pay for iCloud for the rest of your life, or whatever it is you’re gonna do. You don’t have that kind of secondary business. Is that more of a danger to you?

Well, we do have a secondary business of sorts. So hardware is a big part of our business. We actually have a services payments business where we do payments for a lot of the game companies out there, and that’s one of the strategies that we use to try to make our products more available to everyone. That’s the way that we kind of see it. 

We are an ecosystem of sorts. We do great hardware, I think, for game developers and the gamers out there. But we’ve got a software platform that we are able to bring across to all the gamers out there. And of course, it’s a services business at the same time. But the RAM situation, at the end of the day, is still an evolving situation right now.

Do you think it will cap out, and do you think we’ll have enough data center capacity, and things will go back to normal?

I wish I knew. I really don’t.

Is there a point at which the price of RAM, or the price of a marginal Nvidia GPU, becomes too high for you to sustainably do laptops at your scale?

I would say I’m hoping that it doesn’t come to that, right? I think, in short, we’ve seen this happen with the industry multiple times in the past, spiked in terms of pricing. What’s great is that as long as manufacturing kicks in, and we are able to kind of keep up, it’s just economics at the end of the day. There is a spike in terms of pricing. We believe that at some point it will come down. What goes up must come down, and what goes down at some point goes up, too.

Let me come back to what you’re saying about AI and development. AI is the future of gaming. You’ve announced products here, and we’ve talked about Ava, the headset with the cameras and the AI stuff in it. That’s consumer AI products, right? Those are consumer products. And you’re saying your bet is on AI helping developers make better games faster. There’s a gap there, right? 

AI is the future of gaming is an all-encompassing tag line. It means a lot of things to a lot of people, but it sounds like your bet is very specifically in sort of the more enterprise side of the house, helping developers do games better. Is it correct that it’s much narrower than what people are perceiving?

Well, I think the tag line’s very broad, but it’s easier to do a catchier tag line when it’s a broad tag line, as opposed to when it’s hardware we look at or software and stuff like that. But in short, for us, we run an ecosystem. We’ve got hardware, we’ve got software with services. Starting with the hardware, I think we do see that AI is going to be part of the whole kind of conversation. The way that we look at it would be things like whether it’s AI companions, or whether it’s making smart headphones, like with Motoko. We see all of this as augmenting what’s happening today, not replacing it. 

So it’s not a gen AI conversation that we’ve got. It’s about how we bring the smarts, where we design products, and how we bring additional value to our users. For example, using our gaming headphones, all of a sudden, we can provide additional AI capabilities. Is that great? Absolutely. So, that’s one of the things that we’re looking at from a hardware perspective.

Now, from a software and services perspective, as we work with the game developers and publishers, and so on and so forth, we look at additional tools that can make their games better. We can work closely with them on a QA companion basis, for example. And then some of these core technologies, as we provide for them, can then make better games, over and above. So I believe that at some point, it’s not just games, but AI is just gonna be so prevalent or ubiquitous that every single vertical, healthcare, gaming, and entertainment, is gonna have some elements of AI there. And we are just going along with it.

I’ve heard this pitch a lot, and I have a lot of reactions to it. But I guess the simplest way of asking this question is, what have you seen that makes the bet worth it? Because I’ve evaluated a lot of these AI products, the merch team has reviewed a ton of them. We have literally just tried to do the things that Microsoft says you can do in the ads, and the products don’t work. Right? There’s this massive gap between what everyone says is gonna happen, or should be happening, and what is actually happening in the products.

You know, to be a cynic about it for the sake of getting a laugh out of this audience, I will tell you the products are best at convincing you that you should love them, and doing crimes, and they’re not so good at identifying what’s on your screen and helping you get a task done. They are really good at that in the domain of software development, right?

I can see why you’re pushing there with game developers. It’s obvious that Claude Code has ushered in some kind of revolution,