Razer’s Newest Mouse Is A Huge Branding Failure

I buy too many mice, and I don’t even want this one

Alex Rowe
6 min read5 days ago
A Razer Basilisk V3 X HyperSpeed, Cobra Pro, and DeathAdder V3 Pro sitting in a row on a desk mat. The Basilisk battery cover is removed, showing the internal AA slot, and the RGB lighting on the Basilisk and the Cobra is engaged.
Razer mice from left to right: Basilisk V3 X HyperSpeed, Cobra Pro, DeathAdder V3 Pro. Photo taken by the author.

Razer became a gaming tech behemoth on the back of their industry-leading branding and marketing efforts. They pour tons of resources into industrial design, messaging, and generating gamer appeal. You can’t look for PC gaming stuff online without running into their products, and even if you don’t personally like them, they continue to stand out year after year in a crowded field with their well-developed branding efforts.

Their gaming mice are split into three distinct categories all targeting unique price ranges with minimal overlap. This makes it easier for different types of customers to decide which mouse they might want. These categories are known as X/HyperSpeed, Immersive, and Pro — arranged in ascending order of price and internal technology. The three mice in the picture above are examples from each of these categories in that same order. I dug them off of my weird closet shelf o’ tech just to hook them all up.

The X/HyperSpeed chunk of this mouse triumvirate already looks a little confusing because I keep throwing that slash in there to account for two different names, but that’s just due to the march of time. Their cheaper series started out with “X” in the name, and in the last few years “HyperSpeed” has slowly…

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Alex Rowe

Commentary about Games, Audio, and Music. In my past professional lives I edited audio and wrote reviews for a computer magazine.