FPSLabs : Kim Rom on the SteelSeries Ikari

SteelSeries has a new gaming peripheral coming out that looks like it could be pretty damn good. We talk with Kim Rom about how the Ikari Optical/Laser Mouse came to be.

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Stu Grubbs sat down for an interview with Kim Rom of SteelSeries recently at Newegg LANfest 2k7. Questions were regarding development, testing, and theory behind the new SteelSeries Ikari mouse. The following is a verbatim transcript of the conversation (with expletives edited out of course ;] )

How many designs did you go through when you were coming up with the Ikari? What was your process for coming up with the shape and such?

We started actually from the ground up. This was a learning experience for us; we had never done a mouse before. We thought there were definite rooms for improvement for the product line of mice in general. We actually started by reading a thick book about ergonomics and it took forever to get through that and it was one of the most boring experiences of my life, but that was actually how we started. Then we came up with a number of different shapes. Next step was me flying to New York to test with Team 3D where they got hands on with the shapes. I then flew to Dallas, stayed at the complexity house for a few days and had those guys test it. Went back to the drawing board with all the feedback we got. Went down to do a tour in Europe where we talked to some of the mouseports guys and members from SK and NoA.

And that is actually how we defined the shape, based on the input we got from those guys; “I aim like this”, and “I hold the mouse like this”. That was actually how we finalized the shape.

You came out with both optical and laser and you were telling me at the booth that you guys have really improved the laser engine in there with 40,000 samples per second. What does the normal gaming mouse do right now?

A normal gaming mouse usually has around 7 to 9 thousand frames per second. But because this is a completely new technology I cant even describe it as frames per second, obviously it is samples per second, and our mouse has 40,000 samples per second. The samples per second is way more important than any inflated bullshit DPI number. The difference is that it’s all about getting communication between you, the device you’re using and your computer. The more communication you have obviously the more accurate and precise you can be as a player, whereas DPI is more or less a worthless number.

But don’t you have a DPI setting on there?

Of course we have a DPI setting – or let me say we have a CPI setting. DPI stands for dots per inch. Dots per inch has absolutely nothing to do with mice. You don’t have dots on your computer right? You have, you know, counts. So CPI stands for counts per inch. We go up to 3200 counts per inch, but again, its simply not an important number.

But with such a powerful laser engine, why do the optical as well?

Because up until now laser technology has simply not been good enough for FPS games. If you are using one of the current laser mice on the market and you are an fps gamer, you are robbing yourself of performance – you are literally robbing yourself of performance. And as most of the GotFrag readers would probably realize, if you go to any Counter-Strike tournament anywhere in the world, you’ll see that 90 to 97% of all gamers are actually using optical technology – there’s a reason for that.
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So you’ve reinvented laser as something that can actually be counted on in terms of performance, and you’ve created an optical mouse for those who just are not ready for lasers yet?

Yeah. We did make some changes to the optical though. One of the things that we did was take a technology that is proven and reliable and available in other leading brands of optical mice, but what we have done that none of the other guys have done is removed the image correction. If you draw a straight line in paint, you draw a straight line with any of the current mice. Everyone, especially someone as smart as the GotFrag readers, will realize that your hand will never be steady when you try to draw this line. The reason that you’re drawing a straight line is because the mouse is predicting what you want to do, so you actually have correction of your movements.

So you added the ability to disable that or have you already removed it?

We have done it certain degrees actually. You can choose to completely remove it so you have the purest aim in the world, or you can go up in the settings and say “I would like some correction”. I would say that hardcore gamers would definitely go with zero correction of the movement, whereas someone of less talent might start off with a little correction but as they progress as a player will end up with zero correction.

What would you say in response to the argument that the correction has been around for this long without people having noticed it? The first time a lot of people ever heard of it was when reading your blog post on fragyou. So if people have been performing rather well with corrections, is it something that is really that bad? Are they going to see a significant performance gain? People who are already pro players are going to see a huge increase in performance?

A really good professional player will definitely see an increase in their performance because of this. Like everything else when you change your gear or peripherals it will take you time to get used to it, but a good aimer will definitely notice the difference. Someone on the lesser level will not notice it, he is already having trouble just getting his crosshair to the opponent’s head, but for the pro gamer it will absolutely make a difference. When we did testing with PGS (pentagram) gaming, the first question Luke from PGS had was, “Will this have correction?”. He knew about it already. It depends on who it is, because some players are really good and just sit down and play the game, and there are others who just really care about their peripherals. PGS guys are actually pretty cool to develop stuff with because they are highly opinionated and highly knowledgeable about the stuff they are using and they really care about it.

In terms of the CPI switching, you guys went with two settings. What was your thought process on this?

When you are using a mouse and keyboard, it is all about actions per minute. The easier it is for you to communicate with your computer the better. If you have three CPI settings, you will actually have a problem when using that in-game. Let’s say you take the AWP and you go into zoom mode, and that is where you want to do the CPI switching. Imagine you miss it, then you would have press the button up to a number of five times before you hit the correct CPI setting. Does that give you an in-game advantage when you are using a zoom mode and you also have to hit the button five times? No. But if you just have to hit the button once to achieve the desired settings, it cuts down on your reaction time.

And just so you know, we had personal interviews with more than 500 gamers and we did calling on more than 2000 gamers as we developed this mouse. We honestly did not find a single gamer who could tell us that they used three cpi settings while playing a game. They often remapped various functions to that key, but they never used all three buttons as a CPI setting.

So you feel that instead of having discrete buttons for each cpi settings like one of your competitors has, do you find that one button to switch between the two is a lot more effective?

I think our solution is more effective but I only base that on the fact that I could not find a gamer who would use three CPI settings when playing their games.
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One of the only things that I found that I didn’t like about the mouse was the side buttons and that was because they were small. Was there a reason behind where you placed them and how you designed the side buttons?

It all came down to math actually and how everyone has a different grip of the mouse. I think the rest of it just boils down to personal preference.

To be honest, a lot of the peripheral industry boils down to personal preference. You guys have been the peripheral leaders for quite some time and you know better than anyone that people just hate certain things and other people love it.

I would say that from the data we have from the professional gamers and the testing we did, we chose the middle ground.

Have you released the fact that there was an LCD on the bottom of the mouse? That was a complete and utter surprise when you showed that to me today.

We haven’t been marketing our mouse for having an LCD display because its not a defining feature of the product.

It is in the sense that it lets you know what is going on with setting changes and how you can basically use very enhanced setting changes right there on the mouse itself.

Yes, but we didn’t implement that to make it look cool. It’s not a marketing feature. It’s not a defining feature, it’s just a really cool feature that makes life easy.

Fair enough. I guess what it really comes down to is that this is a LAN gamer’s mouse. It doesn’t need drivers.

We make professional gaming gear. The reason we have the tagline is because our target audience is the hardcore gamers that use the products.

Right, and the driverless mouse is really going to push that, especially with the fact that you can set everything right on the mouse. So if you show up at a LAN, all you have to do is plug it in unless you have to change a setting right there on the mouse.

Yes more importantly you don’t have to hassle with installing drivers so there won’t be any stupid admin standing behind you saying that the match will start in nine minutes and you’re installing a driver. I think it will be a lot easier now to have that accessibility.
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One of the things you said in a recent post online was a comment on weight cartridges. My personal opinion on weight cartridge systems is that while I don’t necessarily think that any gamer would be changing the weight on a regular basis, I think it comes down to personal preference and that people should be able to choose how heavy their mouse is.

I totally respect where you’re coming from but my data and all the research I did when coming up with this product indicates that nobody, not a single gamer, wanted a heavy mouse – they wanted the lightest mouse product possible.

I think you’re absolutely right in that you guys have attacked a niche market and done really well for yourselves and people see that in professional gamers. Every event has become a SteelSeries advertisement because so many people use your equipment.

Yeah, I think so. Honestly, we are not more intelligent than Microsoft. We are not more intelligent than Logitech. We are not more intelligent than Razer. The only difference in what we do is we attack our products and design them from the ground up from a completely different perspective. They are trying to make really cool products and then sell them. We are actually going out in the field and asking, “What do you want? How should this function? How should this work?”. This doesn’t make us better or worse, we just have a different philosophy in how we do things.

So how come there aren’t any glowing lights on the Ikari?

As a company we tell everyone that we make sports equipment for gamers. I have never seen Beckham with soccer shoes that glow blue. I have never seen Tiger Woods with a golf club that glows red or green. Would you please tell me when gaming peripherals were designed by the fact that they had glowing lights on them? A gaming peripheral to me is defined by the fact that it gives the user an advantage, gives them a faster reaction time between human and computer, makes them able to perform better in game – it’s not defined by the fact that it glows blue. I completely sympathize with the fact that we are gamers and we want to express that at least on some level, but we do that through our actions not by the fact that we have glowing blue lights in our rooms. I doubt you will ever see a peripheral from SteelSeries that glows blue. We will be implementing LED lights on some of our products but only when they have a function. The SteelKeys 7G will have white LED lights instead of the blue LED lights on the 6G.

Will we ever see a backlit LED keyboard from SteelSeries?

Someday you will. I am confident about that, but when you do you will see that the way we will implement that will be for a reason.

What else can we see out of SteelSeries in the next calendar year?

In the next calendar year, 12 months from now you will see a gaming headset designed for FPS gaming that will completely redefine how we view audio products for gaming. You will see a new mousepad made in cooperation with one of the leading counter-strike players in Sweden. You will see a new keyboard coming out which in my opinion will be THE keyboard. And you will see approximately six or seven hardware products being released in 08.

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