April 12th, 2024, Rishad Dsouza
From RGB lights beaming from keyboards to bright piping highlighted gaming chairs, computer accessories designed for gaming can often be identified with a single glance. And it seems to make intuitive sense – many gamers like to display their identity as gamers.
But YouGov research shows that a fair share of PC and laptop gamers who do use gaming accessories would prefer a non-gamer aesthetic. And an even higher proportion would prefer gaming accessories with a subtle gaming design.
We asked gamers about their preference for gamer-themed designs for various accessories separately –chairs, keyboards, headphones and mice – but shares were largely consistent across each of them.
Roughly a third of gamers who used each of those accessories while gaming said they preferred a strong gaming aesthetic. Overall, headphones won the highest share of support for a more gamer-themed look with 69% of gamers saying they prefer units with either a strong gamer aesthetic or a subtle one. Chairs scored the lowest at 63%.
Roughly a quarter of those who use chairs (24%) and mice (24%) while gaming respectively said that they prefer a non-gaming aesthetic for those accessories, eclipsing the share of those who said so with respect to keyboards (21%).
Somewhat expectedly, deeper analysis shows that younger gamers have a greater preference for a stronger gamer aesthetic in their gaming accessories, but income level analysis throws up some less predictable insights.
Broadly speaking, gamers who make between an average range net income (between $40k to $79.9k) are the least likely to prefer a strong gamer aesthetic. And gamers in the high-income range (above $80k) show a significantly higher preference for the same. Lower income gamers show more variability, with their preferences aligning with high-income gamers with respect to chairs and headphones, but matching their middle-income counterparts for keyboards.
For keyboards and mouse, high-income gamers are way likelier than the other groups to prefer a strong gamer aesthetic. Two-fifths of them (41%) indicate their preference for strongly gamer-themed keyboard designs compared to just over a quarter of gamers from the other income brackets (27% each). A similar share also say they most prefer gaming mice with a strong gamer design (38%), which puts them comfortably higher than the same preference among lower-income (30%) and middle-income (26%) gamers, respectively.
Data like this could help inform design choices for gamer accessories at different price points, hitting each group’s specific design preferences most optimally.
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