It’s time for a bespoke PC controller for PC gaming
By: Lowell Stevens
Tags: Research And Development, Golf, Esports, Keyboard, Mechanical Keyboards

Razer Tartarus. Photo courtesy of Razer, Inc.

If you’re reading this on a computer, put your hand on the keyboard in the FPS position. If you’re like most people, you have your middle finger on W, ring and index on A and D, and pinky on shift. To hit left control, you need to either shift your pinky (measurably the weakest and slowest finger) or push down with the underside of your left pinky knuckle (arguably an imprecise solution). This is a solution that has lasted for years, but using a mouse and keyboard (MKB) for control in shooters and mobas is a scotch tape and chewing gum solution. For the esports industry, worth over a billion dollars globally and growing at a rate of 15% year over year, continuing to use MKB for million dollar tournaments would be like using hockey sticks at the PGA tournament. You can see the limits of this setup at CS:GO tournaments, where players have a habit of turning their keyboards nearly perpendicular (or in some cases, fully perpendicular) to their bodies to avoid overly straining their wrist and to scrape together much needed mousepad space for their low mouse DPI.

If you talk to most PC gamers, even professionals, about the need for a bespoke pc controller, they’ll ask why. “Mouse and keyboard is fine.” I’ve heard this more times than I can count. But with PC gaming bolstering an exploding professional scene in esports, like all sports, it’s time for precisely designed pc game controllers. The mouse and keyboard was never designed to support the controls of a game, especially ones where at any given tournament millions of dollars might be on the line. Just look at the position of W versus ASD on the keyboard. There’s less distance between the ring finger and middle than the middle and index finger. Just this offset could cause carpal tunnel, cramping, wrist strain, or a host of knock-on problems. You might laugh, but pro esports players famously suffer from a multitude of wrist and shoulder problems. Part of this is repetitive strain injury, but a great deal of it comes down to the lack of ergonomic support in the MKB. Even professional film editors or wall street traders have specialized keyboard setups, and while those are arguably larger industries than esports, they won’t always be.

There are many who believe that MKB is fine. But in professional sports, good enough isn’t good enough. In 2019, Nike spent an estimated $6 billion on R&D for their products, many of which serve professional sports. New innovations in golf, hockey, tennis, football, and soccer are released yearly, but gaming keyboard innovations have so far been limited to new optical switches. New gaming keyboards haven’t even taken the relatively minor step of eliminating key offset. Some specialized gaming tools exist, like the Razer Tartarus. While useful, it’s obvious they’re niche at best and haven’t been fully researched or iterated on to the degree other gaming tools have been. While it’s clearly superior in some respects compared to the traditional mouse and keyboard setup, its adoption has been slow at best, reluctant in general, and outright hostile in some instances. When looking at gaming keypads, it’s easy to see the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree. They resemble the western half of a keyboard, sometimes with a palm rest, without any other significant changes. This is serviceable, but the lack of innovation makes consumers reluctant to pick up what is essentially half a keyboard they can’t type on.

Photo by Peter Drew on Unsplash

The industry where technological research and innovation can be most clearly seen in golf. In 1983, Hal Sutton won a PGA title with the Titleist Tour 384, a ball so advanced that the PGA promptly banned it from play for flying too straight, staying airborne too long, and in general representing an unfair material advantage over other golfers. As golf balls look virtually undiscernible to the naked eye, it immediately became a favorite of fairway hustlers looking to game business outings in the afternoon. Similarly, the ERC driver from Callaway created a trampoline effect that could ping a ball farther than other drivers, faster, farther, and more accurately than any other driver on the market, and was banned in 1990. This sort of technological innovation could be applied to the esports market, where ergonomics hasn’t improved much in the past 25 years. Keyboards are still nearly the same as the one that sat in front of the family computer, just clickier and with more colored lights. Mice have had more innovation applied, but in general still have the business style mouse shape they were born with in the 1980s.

Photo by Andreas Haslinger on Unsplash

What will convince gamers to change? Well, like golf, it will take either of two events. One, a large esports body can ban a peripheral from pro play for creating too distinct of an advantage. A clever company could pay a mid-sized esport to ban their peripheral for the marketing clout. The second possible outcome is that a company creates a gaming peripheral designed to replace the keyboard for movement and action, and creates a tool that raises the general skill level of the average player, the way Callaway’s Big Bertha driver made it easier for average golfers to hit the ball like Arnold Palmer (the golfer, not the beverage).

What would be the requirements of a gaming peripheral to replace MKB? The mouse’s accuracy is unparalleled, so the innovations that could be made in the mouse world would be, in my estimation, limited to ergonomic improvements. Professional FPS players should be enlisted with a wish-list of dream features. A few that come to mind might be a way to keep the forearm from excessively dragging on the mousepad, a faster slide across a mouspad, a taller, angled grip to keep the hand from creating friction and ease tension on the wrist over long gaming sessions. For a keyboard replacement, companies should look to replace WASD’s 8 direction binary control with something more nuanced. A joystick with full/none acceleration and 32 directions would be a solid start for FPS, with an easier jump/crouch/sprint/reload setup that doesn’t gnarl the hand and bend the wrist like a Virginia backroad.

An R&D expert I am not. The problem is not one that is easy, fast, or cheap to fix. Worse yet, the entire time a company is fixing this problem, the potential customer base will be listing reasons why a fix is ridiculous, unworkable, unnecessary, or unusable. However, the first company to create and patent a peripheral that creates a distinct advantage for players will not only be first to market, but be first to market for years to come. Some products, like the Razer Tartarus or Orbweaver, Redragon K585, or Logitech G13 are a step in the right direction, but fall short of the ultimate goal of providing a clear physical advantage. The truth is out there, and the first company to create the holy grail of gaming will find themselves cashing in a quest reward of epic proportions.