Cooler Master looks to take gamers by storm

Components vendor takes aim at maverick PC buyers with latest high-end CM Storm brand

Coco Lee: Most gamers will spend a lot on their machines, making it a lucrative market.

After launching its CM Storm brand at the Game Developer Conference in Leipzig, Cooler Master is on a recruitment drive for distributors and resellers.

Coco Lee, CM Storm’s head of global marketing, told CRN that resellers should be prepared to hunt for big game.
“We are going after the hard core enthusiast market. These are people that spend a lot of money on their machines and everything that comes with it,” he said.

Cooler Master is better known for its chassis, PSU and cooling solutions, but Lee told CRN that the company is adjusting to new buyers.

“A couple of years ago I started to notice two distinct breeds of customer for high-end Cooler Master products. It is a bit like the car market. You can spend £30k on a Mercedes or a BMW or blow it on a more funky brand such as the Mitsubishi Evo or Subaru Impreza.”

Cooler Master’s Classic range is its BMW, argued Lee. And now the CM Storm is aimed at the maverick PC buyer.

The CM Storm project has been 18 months in development, but research stretches back further. Lee assembled a team in 2006, and research involved getting intimate with the gamer community. “We were going to huge LAN parties and sitting with the gamers for days,” said Lee. “We would ask them about their systems, likes and dislikes.”

The first product in the CM Storm range is Sniper, a specialist chassis, which is mooted for mass production in October. Samples will be available in November, with a launch planned for December.

This is a potentially lucrative market to get into, Lee said. “Most gamers can easily spend more than £100 on a keyboard and mouse.”
If things get really heated, the Storm chassis promises a unique fan control system too. It goes from full force to whisper quiet, promised Lee.

Though the PC market is tougher, gamers offer hope for the local integrator, said Eszter Morvay, senior research analyst for IDC.

“Price erosion seems to be coming to a halt in the consumer desktop market in western Europe. This stabilisation is due to the adoption of quad-core processors, larger hard drives, more memory and more powerful graphics by users,” she said.