Russian President Vladimir Putin has reportedly instructed his government to begin exploring the creation of a Russian games console in an apparent attempt to reboot the Russian gaming industry.
14.03.2024 - 15:37 / gamesradar.com
The two best controllers I've reviewed in the last year are the Victrix Pro BFG, and the Turtle Beach Stealth Ultra Wireless. You can imagine my surprise, then, when I learned this morning that the parent brands of both of those gamepads would be joining forces.
More specifically, the news has broken that Turtle Beach Corporation, the brand behind some of the best console accessories of the past decade, is acquiring PDP, which is arguably one of its biggest rivals. Both of these companies make some of the best PC controllers available, and in fact, they've both had unrivaled success in the console space recently.
The Turtle Beach Stealth Ultra is the first officially licensed third-party Xbox Series X controller to get wireless support - something that Xbox usually requires its third-party accessories to forgo if they want a license.
The best PS5 controller, without a doubt, is the Victrix Pro BFG. In fact, it's so good, that its Xbox Series X version has just been released, and is virtually unchanged from the original model. I don't know about you, but I can't think of another controller that's so good that it's been 1:1 translated from PlayStation to Xbox.
At first thought, I was excited to see what PDP and Turtle Beach could create together. You're essentially talking about two of the best controller makers in the sector combining their collective talent, and that could make for some truly brilliant controllers in the next couple of years. The press release that announced the news did say that "the transaction substantially grows the size of Turtle Beach", projecting "total revenues of $390 to 410 million in the first full 12 months of ownership (Q2 2024 through Q1 2025)."
Whether these are accurate projections or not, the buyout cost $118 million for Turtle Beach, which, according to numerous reports, has had a fairly turbulent few years financially speaking.
On the other hand, I have no idea how to feel about this merger.
I think, regardless of how it's managed, this acquisition could be huge for the controller market. In fairness, we still have very few details about how it'll play out, and even though I asked both parties for comment earlier today, I'm told they have no news to share on it. In time, I'm sure we'll know more.
We've seen our fair share of acquisitions in the gaming hardware space recently, though, so we can speculate based on what we've seen elsewhere. Logitech bought Blue, one of its biggest rivals in the content creation/microphone space. Following that, the Blue brand has been pretty much eradicated, surviving only in updated versions of its products under the "Logitech G" name.
While we are still testing the Logitech Yeti GX, the updated model of the Blue Yeti Nano,
Russian President Vladimir Putin has reportedly instructed his government to begin exploring the creation of a Russian games console in an apparent attempt to reboot the Russian gaming industry.
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