IKEA is wooing gamers with a £50 gaming chair and a wooden hand

IKEA has teamed up with Republic of Gamers to add cut-price gaming goods to its warehouses

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IKEA has partnered with Asus sub-brand Republic of Gamers (ROG) for a new range of gamer-friendly furniture – including a £50 gaming chair and rather eerie hand-shaped accessory stand.

Take a look at the new range and you’ll get the impression that the new products are far more IKEA, with just a touch of Republic of Gamers flavour, as opposed to the Swedish outfit being all in on the kind of frantic rainbow-laden RGB you can find on some gaming accessories.

For IKEA, this is about attracting gamers who aren't happy with the company’s existing offer of home furnishings – that’s according to Ewa Rychert, business leader for workspaces at IKEA. The appeal of gamers as customers for the furniture brand is obvious. The gaming market reached a value of $168 billion in 2020, and IKEA has punchy targets. “We want to reach three billion people by 2025,” says Rychert. IKEA says its customer base is already over two billion, but adding another 30 per cent is no small task despite already having more than 420 stores in over 50 countries.

IKEA also sees ROG as the perfect partner for the task. It's behind some of the best gaming hardware on the market right now – including the WIRED Recommends best gaming laptop, the Asus ROG Zephyrus G15. 

Sofia Wiktorsson, product design developer at IKEA, is keen to stress that IKEA's teams learned “everything” from ROG when it comes to gaming. “This is a new area for us and the knowledge we have is limited," she said. "For us to partner up with someone who has expertise, who has the network of the real gamers to professional gamers, and the fan base - that was crucial for us,” she said.

IKEA has done this many times before – from Adidas and LEGO to its ongoing recent partnership with Sonos. These kinds of collaborations are fast becoming the norm for the brand. And, as with ROG, they make a lot of sense – providing IKEA with swift access to, and apparent legitimacy in, new categories where it may have not had consumer attention previously.

IKEA and ROG used the Asus sub-brand’s network to dig into gamers’ needs. “We had a lot of meetings with the gaming [community], who ROG connected us with," explains Rychert. “But ... as a company, we have done many home visits, all over the world, asking the question to gamers: where are the pain points?”

“There were a lot of pro gamers who helped out during workshops and during design meetings – just to help to shed light on the needs of gamers,” added Emanuel Jarnland, marketing manager at ASUS and ROG Nordic. 

The results? Reps were told that gaming products were priced high while still lacking ergonomic considerations. However, IKEA could easily bring improved ergonomics to gamer-friendly chairs on its own, so why the need for Republic of Gamers? Rychert says the collaboration resulted in some gamer-specific additions to IKEA’s creations. “It was the lumbar support, the headrest, it was the manipulation of the armrest in different 3D ways; that we didn't have in an IKEA office chair because it was not necessary to go to that extent,” she says.

Compared to IKEA’s new gaming range, Jarnland says ROG gaming chairs tend to be focused on “unique features, like RGB lighting, that cater to gamers and also impacts the price range. When working with IKEA, the focus has been different, on more of a broad target audience.”

While these conclusions make sense, they are obvious. IKEA’s partnership with ROG looks to be its simplest yet, with the furniture veteran applying many principles to this new gaming range you’d assume it would be perfectly capable of managing in house. Gamers sit for a long time? Add enhanced lumbar support. Many gaming chairs are expensive and quality can be a mixed bag? Make a no-frills option for £50. It seems unlikely Ikea would need ROG to come to these conclusions.

Above all for IKEA, it is about balancing cost with features – keeping that all-important price low. For the ROG partnership, adding these gamer-specific features while keeping the RRP down was a challenge. “Is it worth it to invest because then the customer needs to pay for it?” says Witkorsson. “We want to make it as affordable as possible, but this feature was about the lumbar support, the armrests, the headrest in our product. You can adapt.”

Adapt IKEA has, adding these features and keeping the prices extremely low – something that could be a recipe for success. However, despite a need to stick to aggressive pricing, IKEA has been keen to tout its sustainability commitments. With many gaming chairs costing upwards of £200, it will be interesting to see just how long a £50 gaming chair will last.

Rychert touched on these goals when justifying the inclusion of one of the range’s less essential items – a £4.50 gaming cup: “We are trying to make small changes, small steps towards a more sustainable style of living. So, the cup you can use several times and it isn't plastic, so that's something which we want to also bring to the new generation.” That’s a fine conceit, but the lifespan of the higher – yet still reasonably – priced products in this range may test IKEA’s green commitments.

The new gaming range features a gaming desk, storage unit, pegboard, mug and more – with the products set to range from £7.50 and £350. Simple colours and minimalist design span the range for all but one product – a wooden hand, designed to hang your accessories, that sticks out like a sore thumb (and four fingers). Gaming chairs, priced between £45 and £125 are front and centre – drastically undercutting many rivals, like Razer’s new £500 Iskur chair.

While a gaming chair, a gaming desk, accessories stands, ring lights and, even, mouse mats feel right at home in this range, IKEA X ROG goes as far as the gaming mug – something you wouldn’t think would require much insight to develop. Witkorsson’s explanation for the more superfluous products in the range is that IKEA is thinking about the “complete solution.” “If you sit for many hours, you have a lot of needs during these hours. You need to have be clutter-free, you need to organise your things, you have a lot of gadgets that you need to have easily at hand.”

IKEA’s partnership with ROG may be its most straightforward and surface-level team-up yet, and, like previous partnerships, its existence is purely a means for the company to reach that 3 billion customer mark by 2025. For ROG, it’s a no-brainer. ROG’s hardware is better than ever and, if Sonos’s impressive financial results following its IKEA team-up is anything to go by, it really couldn’t have passed this opportunity up.

When it comes to the all-important customer, the products will have to be tested and judged. The prices are, unsurprisingly, hugely competitive with what’s on offer today – with the gaming desks and chairs looking like surefire hits. But, will the quality and longevity of these products stand up? IKEA hasn’t always had the best track record in this regard, but it is also now encouraging the recycling of products more than ever. The proof will be in the flat-packed pudding.

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This article was originally published by WIRED UK