Razer Makes Progress.

A year or so ago Razer took out a full page ad in the New York Times stating that 'pc gaming is not dead'.  Thanks.  In my opinion it was an overly expensive ad marketing to the wrong audience.  Kind of weird to review a game companies marketing strategy, but it's one of my more popular posts.  Razer has since starting doing some more creative, more targeted advertising, which addresses many of my concerns.

Becky Taylor posted a tweet about Razer working with the IGDA.

This marketing strategy makes more sense.  Razer has learned exactly the lessons they needed to.  1.) Lower price point.  Offering the Razer Blade to developers for $1000 is a much better deal.  2.) Prestige. Indie Developers have a certain Cache.  But in the hands of a AAA Developer this neat 'feature' could be really cool.  3.) Developers.  People who can actually write neat code for that unique little input device that Razer has on their machine.

So how could this go wrong?  Well the ad does not mention the inclusion of an SDK.  Maybe the developer just wants to make their own games and wont ever develop for the device, but why take the risk of missing that opportunity?  A great game could make that little pad desirable.  Granted the market for that game would be tiny as highly specialized hardware is not a great thing for any game.  But why miss that chance?

While not perfect, this new partnership with IGDA makes a lot of sense for many of the reasons I pointed out years ago.  Getting the device into the hands of developers, who can rave about it to their audience, is a much better marketing move then attempting to sell an expensive device to the general public.