Gaming hardware markets can be very competitive spaces. Loads of brands try to peddle what can often be really similar products but, for the most part, marketing for them all stays pretty cordial. I've been covering gaming hardware for three years now, and I seldom see one brand blatantly name its rivals and try to tear down the competition. Elgato seems to be taking a different approach because it's just thrown a lot of shade at some of the best gaming chairs money can buy.
A few days ago, Elgato unveiled the Embrace, a completely new product from this arm of Corsair. For a brand that usually makes tech, peripherals, and some of the best gear for streaming, it's fun to see it branch out into a new market. However, the Embrace is not a gaming chair, and it seems like Elgato really wants to make that really clear.
"In the mid-2000s, gaming chairs came onto the scene," said Jeff Stegner, Product Manager at Elgato, in an announcement video on the brand's YouTube channel.
"These chairs came in at a premium price point and were extremely popular, and are still sold to this day by a multitude of brands. However, the issue with these chairs is they lack adjustability. You can essentially adjust its height, armrest height, and then you have the recliner on the back, and that's it. And when you're sitting on a chair for hours on end, the lack of adjustability can cause problems with comfort."
I review gaming chairs for a living, and while I can say that that's a true statement for a few, pretty limited and cost-effective seats, it's really not the norm.
Gaming chairs pride themselves on their adjustability these days, and have done so for a while. So, Elgato issuing a blanket statement while showing a clip of someone violently adjusting the recline level on an AndaSeat product definitely made my ears prick up. I'd go so far as to say that the majority of gaming chairs these days include multiple-dimension armrest adjustments, custom lumbar support, with a few flagships even offering seat depth adjustments, and even floating backrests.
"Steggy" continues by noting that, to combat the increasing popularity of office chairs, gaming chair brands have started to include more ergonomic adjustability and high-end features, but says that to get these things, you need to pay over a grand.
As he's saying this, the video cuts to show retail screenshots of the Herman Miller Logitech Embody and the Asus ROG Destrier Ergo chair, two particularly pricey chairs, but two blatant outliers in the market when it comes to price.
This is when I got a bit confused. Elgato's parent company, Corsair, also makes gaming chairs, including the excellent Corsair TC500 Luxe, which offers most of the features Elgato's marketing team says gaming chairs lack - for the price of $500 - which just so happens to be the cost of the new Elgato Embrace.
I can list you plenty of gaming chairs, like the Fractal Refine, the Secretlab Titan Evo, the Boulies Master Series, and the AutoFull G7, that all offer loads of adjustability for around the $500-$700 mark, and if not, they're absolutely under the $1,000-$2,000 price point Elgato is firing shots at.
In fact, one brand the video names and shames is Razer, which charges $699 for its Iskur V2, but put out the Razer Iskur V2 X this year, providing a lot of the same features for just $299. Similarly, AndaSeat, the example in the video of a clunky and non-adjusting gaming chair brand, released the AndaSeat Novis this year, which keeps its cost below $500.
Corsair's own flagship gaming chair costs only $518 right now and offers adjustable armrests, lumbar support, a magnetic head cushion, recline, and a really classy design.
Corsair TC500 Luxe: $518 at Amazon
"Our goal with Embrace was to offer a chair with the comfort, features, and manual adjustability of a high-end office chair, but at a much more accessible price point," Stegner says.
The video then goes on to cover what makes Embrace so great compared to all these rival offerings, starting with the assembly process.
Now, I've had to assemble a fair few gaming seats in my job, and I can tell you that they basically all have the same build process, minus a few discrepancies. You put the wheels in the wheelbase, the gas pipe in the wheelbase, connect the seatbase to the bottom, then fix the backrest to the rest of the piece.
Despite Elgato saying other chairs have "laborious" setups, that exact process is precisely what's outlined in the video for building the Elgato Embrace. Thankfully, Elgato does seem to be improving on convention in one way, and that's sustainability. All the plastic packaging most gaming chairs use for wrapping parts of the chair up, or separating tools, has been removed, substituted for cardboard, and recyclable cloth pouches.
When it comes to ergonomics though, I really don't think Elgato's marketing has been fair or accurate to what else is available at this price range.
The Embrace has a mesh back, a non-mesh, cushioned seat, 4D armrests, adjustable lumbar support and seat depth, and five levels of recline. You also get a recline tension twister, so you can determine how much you need to push back to actually get into that reclined position.
Pretty much beat for beat, that means that the Embrace has the exact same list of features that the Fractal Refine does. That chair launched at $549 / $474 and can be frequently found on sale for less. So, I'm left questioning what exactly is so new and accessible about Elgato's "studio" chair.
This is where the real issue lies for me.
A brand outwardly naming and shaming other products and saying they don't do enough is fine, so long as the brand doing so can actually prove it's doing something different. As someone who gets all the press releases and announcements about new gaming chairs and covers this market for a living, Elgato's way of unveiling its own chair seems a tad combative and misleading for consumers.
All the while, it says that its chair isn't a gaming chair, it's a "studio" chair, as if that makes all the comparisons okay.
Either way, this approach of steering into a new market is not a great look for Elgato, especially when its parent brand is one of the only big gaming chair makers that isn't directly shown as a bad example in the video, and yet its products do the same things as everyone it's critiquing.
The Elgato Embrace isn't available to purchase yet, but there is a listing for it at the brand's website. While it's only going to be available in one color at launch, there are hints in the reveal video that more colorways will be available later.
- See all gaming chairs at Amazon
- Fractal Refine: $599.99 at Amazon
- Corsair TC500 Luxe: $518 at Amazon
Want to find some other Elgato gear? Read up on the best capture cards, the best microphones for streaming and gaming, and the best streaming mixers.
