I received an e-mail this week from one of our readers who read my Editorial on if Gaming Glasses were necessary and he wanted to know my thoughts on Full Spectrum Gaming Peripherals. For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, they are multi-color peripherals such as Corsair’s multicolor backlighting keyboards, or more notably Razer Chroma. This actually really started to make me think as I have a friend who attempted to ask Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan why Chroma needed to exist and why they needed to have a huge premium price, which actually led to him being blocked on Twitter. It does raise a great question, why do my peripherals need 16 million color options?
I’ll admit, I really do sorta see the endless option that comes with having a keyboard or mouse with this feature. On the one hand you can customize the colors exactly how you want them. So maybe instead of having just a normal Red color, you can have Crimson or Maroon to match your favorite sport team. Girly girls can just set it to Pink or Baby Blue if they decide to use your computer, or if you wanted to give them the peripherals as a gift. Plus if you want to feature your setup in YouTube or on streaming services like Hitbox or Twitch, you can easily make a video or screenshot of it with your keyboard looking like the intro to Reading Rainbow.
My biggest complaint isn’t actually about why you would need any color besides the normal 8-10 options that some come with, but why are they so expensive? Let’s take the Razer Blackwidow Tournament Edition as an example. The regular Tournament Edition keyboard will cost you $79.99 if you purchase it on the Razer Store, but if you want the Chroma feature, it will set you back $139.99. This is literally the exact same features only with the multicolor lighting and it will cost you almost twice as much. Heck even the regular BlackWidow is guilty of the same thing. A regular Blackwidow costs $99.99, but a Chroma Edition costs $169.99.
Now before I go on I do realize that mechanical switches are expensive as well as the proprietary software that is used to have all the color options. It just still personally doesn’t justify the humongous price increase. Personally, I would be fine if they just added the option of 8 different colors and charged $10-$20 more. That would make so much more sense to me.
In conclusion, I personally don’t see a need to buy them especially considering the costs. Some have tried saying that companies who are developing these are just trying to capitalize on all the little kids who just want something shiny and colorful, and yeah I can kinda understand why. I really would like to know your opinions of it. Do you believe they are necessary? Do they justify the price increase?
