Razer changed gaming with its hardware. Now it’s hoping to do the same with AI

0:00This episode of Beyond the Valley is sponsored by the Singapore Week of Innovation and Technology by Enterprise Singapore. Investors are always on the hunt for the next big opportunity, especially when it comes to tech. Over the past decade, an increasing amount of that attention has shifted towards Asia. At the heart of this story is Singapore, a small city-state that's become a major gateway for companies and investors looking to tap into Asia's booming tech market. But how did Singapore build this reputation and what makes it such a critical player in the global tech landscape?

0:38Hello and welcome to Beyond the Valley. I'm Arjun Karpal and this is the second episode in a three-part series exploring Singapore's rise as an Asian tech hub. From serving as a home to major investors to becoming a key outpost to the world's biggest tech firms, I'll unpack how Singapore has carved out its role in an ever-changing industry. My guest for this episode has built one of Singapore's most successful tech firms, Min Liang Tan, the co-founder and CEO of Razor. Min, thanks so much for joining me on this episode of Beyond the Valley. Thank you for having me. So, look, let's talk about the starting of Razer 2005, all those years ago.

1:17What motivated you? Because you were a lawyer before, right? Yes. So what motivated you to change from being a lawyer to going into this, you know, cool gaming venture? Well, wow, that's 20 years. So it's our 20th year anniversary this year. And essentially, you know, I was a lawyer. I did the whole thing with the Asian parents thing where, you know, you can be a doctor, you can be a lawyer. But at heart, and I suspect I speak on behalf of many of the young people out there, I've always been a gamer right back then. And while I was passionate about the law, I was more passionate about gaming. So, you know, when you're a gamer, it's all about the competitive advantage, how you're going to be able to kind of, you know, beat your friends at a game and stuff like that.

2:00So it came from that. And we built the first, the world's first gaming mouse, which was the Razer Boomslang. Yeah, the Boomslang. What is that, Snake? Yes, it is. Yeah, yeah. It's a name of South African incredibly venomous snake. And back then, I think when we built the first gaming mouse, it was all about being faster, more precise, more accurate. And essentially, when we built that together with a couple of friends of ours, we thought, well, this is going to be the one single product that we're going to have. We're never going to have anything else. It's just for ourselves. and we said, okay, instead of all these like crappy tech names out there, like MX, you know, 5000 and stuff like that, we wanted to have a name that for a mouse that ate other mice.

2:43So there you have it. We decided to pick a snake name and it's the Razer Boomslag. Why did you go for a mouse? What was it that motivated you to think that was our first product? Oh, wow. Well, for a gamer, the mouse is everything. It's the extension of your arm. the more precise your your your mouse is the more likely you are going to be able to get frags that's what we called it uh back then uh against your friends and things like that so that was the mouse we started with the mouse we extended to the keyboard the headset and boom today we are one of the largest gaming peripherals companies in the world do you think that was motivated out of being in asia because you know when i think about 2005 i'm based in the uk i I grew up in the UK and it was all about console gaming, right?

3:28And that was so big in so many markets. But with Asia, PC gaming was huge. Online gaming, internet cafes that were popping up. So do you think like that, you know, fed into it somewhat? Well, I think the crazy part about it, it was that it was actually a global kind of a collaboration built over game servers. So, you know, myself and my co-founder, my co-founder was actually based out of the US. We got together and then we talked to another friend of ours in Europe in terms of gaming, and all of us were communicating through game servers at that point of time. So in short, I actually think it was really the global nature of gaming that gave birth to Razer as a company.

4:08Just before this interview, I was reading a Reddit thread, and I think your fans would be upset if I didn't ask you this, but they were talking about the boomslang and saying, are you going to do a 20th anniversary edition? Absolutely. So we have just teased it. We've been talking about it. So the boom slang is probably one of the most iconic kind of designs for gamers everywhere in the world, right? It was the first gaming mouse. We are making a 20th year anniversary and we should have some news on it pretty soon. So let's talk about kind of life as a Singaporean entrepreneur as well. What was it like trying to build a global company out of Singapore when you founded it in 2005 with your co-founder?

4:50Sure. Well, we were fortunate in the sense where, you know, we are dual headquartered as a company. Today, we're still dual headquartered both in the US and in Singapore. For us, I think it was truly, as I've mentioned a little earlier before, the global nature of gaming that allowed us to go global very, very quickly. So we didn't really focus on Singapore as a market, but we really focused on North America, Europe, because there were gamers everywhere. And today, our business spans even from the emerging markets, Latin America, Southeast Asia, etc. Primarily because we went to where the gamers are.

5:27You know, for gamers, by gamers, that's our motto. And till today, it's remained the same for 20 years. So it was quite global mindset from the outset. Absolutely. From the outset, we pretty much focus on where the gamers were. And, you know, at some point when you're on a server, you don't care whether, you know, the other person's in the U.S. Well, except when it comes to ping and lag and things like that. Essentially, you know, gamers are everywhere and we've got our own language. It's a little bit of a subculture by itself. And that's how we started. And, you know, if you were talking to other entrepreneurs, building companies from Singapore, is that something they should keep in mind in terms of being able to think global from the outset given I guess the the size of the market here of course is quite small uh anyway but there's a huge potential market on the doorstep right yep so twofold the way I would see it is you know Singapore is a great place to start a company it's efficient it's productive um and it's a great test bed for many of the products so you know oftentimes startups talk about PMF product market fit right So this is a great place to kind of test it out, to get the product out there.

6:33But that comes to the second bit where the world is a lot larger. The TAM, the opportunities, so much larger. So start in Singapore, get your product market fit, get the product tested out, and then focus on the world very, very quickly. Whether it's US, Europe, Asia, China, for example, massive market. And we're in this interesting time in the world where Singapore is a great place to kind of access both the American and the Chinese markets. We don't hear a lot about kind of big global brands, particularly in tech coming out of Singapore. We've had some good successes yourselves, of course, Grab, you think about.

7:13But do you think that's changing now? And what do you think kind of is changing about the tech ecosystem here? So I think the tech ecosystem here is really maturing, right? versus 20 years ago when I first started. Now there are a lot more venture capital. There is a lot more acceptance in terms of entrepreneurship. There's a lot of support. Look at us here, right? In Switch, it's exciting. There's a whole lot of buzz happening at the same time. But I think there are really two kind of paths that companies or startups take from here. To focus on Southeast Asia, which is a great opportunity, I think, for a lot of startups over here because there's really access to the Southeast Asian markets and, of course, going global at the same time, going to the US and China throughout.

7:59So I do think both paths are available to companies looking to scale outside of Singapore. And really, the sky's the limit. Do you think there's anything missing from the ecosystem that you'd like to see? I would love to see even more support, I think, for the mid-stage companies. So I think there are quite a number of investors right now in the seed stage, Series A. I think past that, Series B and Series C would love to see more private equity. We're seeing that growth happening over here in Singapore right now. And over and above, we'd love to see a lot more vibrant capital markets here in Singapore, the SGX, for example.

8:39And I think the Singapore government is doing quite a bit of work of focus in respect of that. But, you know, being able to see that stage of companies being able to be founded in Singapore, funded in Singapore, being able to go public in Singapore, I think that would be, you know, even better. I mean, let's talk about gaming then, because it's a personal enjoyment of mine. I still play games when I have the time. But you started life as a company doing peripherals, you know, for the gaming market. We talked about the mouse. But in your time in the industry, what have been the biggest shifts you've seen?

9:12What are the two, three biggest things you've seen, whether it's in PC or console or mobile, whatever it might be? What are those? So I think the biggest shift over the past 20 years, right, really is how the definition of gamer has really evolved. Right. Back in the early days, it was predominantly male, 12 to 21. But that has really evolved. It's also been accelerated by COVID, where it brought a whole lot of new gamers across. Now, so gaming as an industry used to be a small niche kind of industry, but gaming today is bigger than movies, it's bigger than music combined. Essentially, it is a single form of entertainment for pretty much, you know, everyone out there.

9:54So I think that has been the biggest shift in the sense that gamers right now, the two, three billion, it's pretty much everybody in the world at this point of time. So, you know, for us at Razer, our motto has always been for gamers, buy gamers. and the products and services that we've come up with have really also evolved along the way. Now, we started, as you've mentioned, with gaming peripherals. Today, we're still one of the world's biggest gaming peripherals companies in the world. But on a software level, we've got 300 million users on our software platform. We're one of the biggest software platforms out there.

10:23We've got gaming payments, which we help game companies do payments. We process over$10 billion worth annually of game payments and growing. So essentially, we have as Razer really grown with how the gamer demographic has grown, despite the fact that we've always remained single-minded and focused on just one user, the gamer. And how have you adapted to the shifts in technology and gaming preferences? Because, you know, we had internet getting better over that time, right? Which allowed better online gaming experience. We had the boom of mobile and people switching to casual mobile gaming, unserious mobile gaming, eSports becoming a serious kind of sector of the gaming market as well.

11:05So there's been so many different things. What have you done to adapt? Well, I think in short for us, we've not really changed from 20 years ago in the sense that this has always been more a passion than a business for us. So the focus, as I said, for gamers by gamers has been this single-minded focus on ourselves. It's an excuse, right? We talk about having no time to game. For us, it's our job. So in this sense, you know, being able to say, look, what do we want to build for ourselves? And it was really looking at all the pain points, whether it's a better mouse, a better keyboard, a better headset, better audio technology, a better game launcher, a faster, more efficient way to pay for games, because it was just so difficult for us to be able to do that.

11:49So in short, we just focused on the gamer and we evolved with the gamer, built, you know, products and services around the gamer. And today, we're still pretty much the same as we were 20 years ago. What about this region of Asia? Because it's become so central to the global gaming store. And a lot of young people. A lot of young people, right? And also, if you just think about, you know, consoles, you know, Nintendo and PlayStation, these are from Japanese companies. and you think about the gaming base for e-sports, so many out of Korea, out of China, out of various countries here in Asia as well.

12:25How is it that Asia has become so central to the global story? Well, I think really, as I've mentioned, it's really the fact that we have a lot of youth over here. Like Southeast Asia, one of the youngest populations, I think, comparatively in the world. And essentially with a lot of young people, you know, the demand for game content, better gameplay, better gaming hardware has really come out from here. And of course, with gaming evolving also at the same time to be more competitive, more immersive. So a good example is that we spend a lot of time with some of the top game companies in the world, making the games more immersive.

13:01The latest game titles, Borderlands 4, Battlefield 6. You know, we put our tech stack in there to help the games become more immersive. Now, over and above, we've also seen gamers become a lot more competitive. You know, in the sense wherein it's no longer just about being the best amongst your friends. It's now about being a best worldwide. You've got eSports World Cup, you know, funded out of in Saudi Arabia, with Riyadh being now a capital of eSports at this point of time, competitive gaming. So pretty much, I would say it is digital entertainment providing for a lot more immersive and competitive environment and a lot of young people being committed and dedicated across the game.

13:39What do you like to play, Min? Do you have time? It's your job. You said it's your job. So it's an excuse. So I love it. You know, whenever I play new games and after the first half an hour or an hour, technically speaking, I've actually done my homework. But I go like, oh, no, I've got to work a little harder. I've got to play this a little longer. I love simulation games because I can play that on long flights, you know, civilization and things like that. I like RPGs, you know, to a great extent because I get immersed in it. You know, I play some of the more competitive ones that like Wukong or Elden Ring and stuff like that.

14:10but I get incredibly frustrated by it. And that's one reason why we came up with Project Ava, like the gamer companion, because I was just so incredibly frustrated getting caught with that. But first-person shooters, that has always been my passion. Well, you mentioned it now. So we can talk about Project Ava. You call it the Razer Gameco AI. Yes. So this is like an AI coach. And I spoke to you a few months back before we recorded this, when you were sort of just launched it and it was still very new. Just run us through how it works for those who haven't heard of it. Maybe just overarching things for AI for us at Razer.

14:48The way we see it is that AI is going to completely disrupt everything or change everything in gaming in the sense where game developers will now be able to use AI tools. And then you've got game publishers that will now distribute market new games with AI tools and make things incredibly efficient. And finally, for gamers, the AI tools will be able to change things, I think in terms of the way they play, how they play, so on and so forth. Now, specifically about the Gamer AI side of things, we developed Project Ava, now known as Gamer Core AI. We use computer vision to watch what's happening in the game, pretty much like how your annoying elder sibling is going to watch over your shoulder and look at the game and things like that.

15:29But in this case for Gamer Core AI, because he's got the benefit of all the data, of all the games out there, the Gamer Co. AI can then now provide tips and tricks like look you're stuck in a boss in Wukong or if you're stuck in a boss in Elden Ring how are you going to be able to beat that? Now what about in an RPG? If you don't know how to solve this quest or where's the specific door to go after the Gamer Co. AI can help you with that. Now or if you're getting super competitive with the Gamer Co. AI because we've also ingested a huge amount of esports data from some of the best esports athletes out there you can now use it as an esports coach to be able to make your game better and to be able to compete on the highest levels.

16:10How have people reacted to this? Because I think back to, you know, before this was a thing and before, you know, you just play a game, get stuck on a level and you go online, right? You go to YouTube. You go to YouTube, see a walkthrough, maybe read a guide on how to do this, whatever it might be, right? So that was the kind of original way to do it. So is this kind of taking that and bringing it into the modern era? Absolutely. So, well, you know, for myself in the very early days, it was getting a physical copy of a game guide, reading it, or it was by word of mouth. You know, I even remember some of the very early tips and tricks that we used for gaming, and it would be passed by word of mouth from, you know, gamer to gamer, and then you would talk about it and stuff like that.

16:56So essentially, we see it as a tool that you can pull on, you can use if you want to, but if you don't want to, you can still challenge yourself. so it's really just an additional layer, additional tool for gamers to be able to make use of. It's so funny you mention word of mouth because I remember years ago on the original PlayStation I had Street Fighter and my uncle came over and he goes, you've got to try this move out. I said, where has this come from? There was no record of it. And he told me this move with Akuma. And only I knew it, he knew it and none of my friends knew it. And so I'd pull out this move, drain like three quarters of their health.

17:29And then what happens from there is that when you're playing the move, your pals go like, hey, where did that come from? And then they'll bug you until you have to teach them. Yeah, exactly. And then they will go show off to another bunch of people. And that's exactly how, you know, word of mouth. And, you know, I think for myself as a gamer, we've gone through that. And AVA or Gamer Co. AI is essentially an extension of that for us to be able to do that. Is this being brought into competitive? And we'll speak a bit more about the e-sports industry, competitive gaming. but is this being brought into esports at the moment?

18:00Because this is a huge debate, right? About should this be allowed in that kind of environment? Well, you know, it depends. Of course, in that kind of environment, we will not have AI running, I think, during a game itself. But what about at the point of time of training? And of course, we work with, at Razer, I think we're probably the brand that most esports athletes associate us with. We are the hyper-competitive brand that many of the top esports athletes use. So we work with some of them And they have been working with us to say, how can we work with AI to get the knowledge that they've got?

18:34Because at some point of time, they're going to retire and things like that, so that they can then teach the next generation of e-cell sports athletes to be a coach, to be on the fly and to be able to coach pretty much anyone who just plugs it in. So I do think that there's a lot of excitement in respect of this. The opportunities are limitless. What about the developer side? Because you mentioned that as well. and you've got another product, QA. Companion. Yeah, Companion, QAI. And this helps developers test for bugs. What are the kind of key features of that? Sure. So traditionally, QA is an often overlooked aspect of game development, but it's an incredibly important part of game development.

19:15It's about 20, 30 % of the costs. It takes up about 30 % of the time. So it is incredibly time-consuming. Now, the traditional QA tester, it's a whole bunch of people sitting in a room, they're playing through the game, and every time they identify a bug, they have to stop the game, write it down, try to reproduce the steps, and then log it into a Jira ticket and things like that. So what we've done with QA Companion is that we've completely automated the entire process. We use computer vision, it uses the same kind of primitives, AI primitives as Gamer Companion, it watches what the QA tester is doing, and then it automatically logs the bugs it identifies the bugs it logs the bugs it puts it through a jira ticket and soon it's also going to provide you the steps to to rectify the bug at the same time so in short qa companion will be able to scale to allow qa testers to be a lot more effective and productive how far do you think ai is going to go in gaming what are we talking about here game you know graphics development uh you know worlds that generate themselves how far do you think this I think it's going to completely change all of gaming, every single aspect from development to publishing to the way gamers play.

20:31I would say that it is as fundamental, if not more fundamental than 2D gaming going to 3D gaming from single players to multiplayers, right, to to Internet gaming. It is one of the biggest aspects of gaming. And AI gaming, I think, will not just be big for gaming itself, but will spawn also multiple other new industries that will come from gaming. I mean, for what it's worth, a lot of what's happening in the tech industry was born from gaming. And I believe that a lot of what will happen for AI will also be born from AI gaming. What do you think, you know, if we're talking over the next three to five years, What do you think are going to be some of the more immediate things we see with AI and gaming?

21:14Well, first up, and I wouldn't even say it's as far as three to five years. Like, for example, what we're doing with the game developers today at Razer. So in short, we've got, you know, the domain knowledge of gaming. We work very closely with the game developers. We've got distribution. About 70 ,000 of the game developers out there use our SDKs and stuff like that. We've got a huge amount of data that allows us to build great models for the game companies. what we've realized as we are building out things like QA Companion and we are building out new tools for game developers that will help them develop games a lot faster, amplify their creativity and with a lot more scale is that we believe in the next one and a half, two years, we will see very small teams like indie studios today making AAA titles, you know, and that is with the help of AI.

22:03Now, are we going to have, does this mean that humans will not be involved? No. So the human creativity still needs to be there. But AI will take out a whole lot of maybe some of the tedious tasks, right? Everything from QA and logging bugs and things like that. And essentially be able to use all of this, you know, the AI tools to amplify the creativity and get a whole lot more done with a lot less. I think, I mean, every industry is grappling with this, right? What is the impact on jobs in whatever their respective industry is? And we've seen tech companies with huge layoffs putting some of that down to AI.

22:43We've seen industries grappling with that question. What do you think the impact will be on the market for jobs in gaming? I actually think it will be hugely positive in a sense wherein, you know, in the past, people, as I've mentioned, would say you need a huge team, a lot of money to be able to build these AAA titles and things like that. I think all that's going to change where you'll have smaller teams that are going to be a lot more agile, a lot more creative to be able to build big games. And in this sense, it provides a lot more opportunity. I would say that for us at Razer, we believe in building tools or companions to people or developers or QA testers to make the job a lot better, a lot faster.

23:21And I do think that that is what's going to happen with the industry with a lot more content. And the gamers will have a lot more opportunities out there to play different games. Let's move on to esports as well, Min, because this is an area that I feel is underappreciated by the kind of broader world because it's huge, right? It's massive. It's massive. But maybe it hasn't hit that mainstream kind of yet. It's fascinating to see. What do you think propels the growth of esports from here? Well, you know, when you talk about mainstream, I believe it's already mainstream for the youth, right? Today, I think a lot more youth are actually watching esports, participating in eSports than traditional sports as a whole.

24:01I think eSports by itself, I would say, is already larger than particular sports that we look at. The prize money in terms of eSports right now, the number of people watching it concurrently. So I think it's a massive opportunity. And, you know, we're seeing the Olympics, the Olympic Games going to have its own version of the eSports also at the same time. I just think it's going to continue growing. and, well, primarily fueled by the fact that, you know, most of the youth are all into esports. And do you think sort of Asia is going to drive that growth? I know you mentioned the Esports World Cup over in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, which has been a big deal.

24:43The prize money there is massive. But where do you think the kind of growth is going to be propelled from? Well, you know, I think the growth is going to be propelled from everywhere, you know, in the sense wherein, so, you know, In the early, early days, Korea was the nexus of all esports, and it grew from there. And we've seen China being a massive, massive force in terms of esports at this point of time. The sheer number of viewers and people passionate about esports in China is huge. So Asia is going to be a big place where you're going to see a lot of esports athletes coming through, and the viewers also at the same time.

25:19But for what it's worth, the US, Europe, you get some of the top esports athletes out there. So at Razer, we work very closely with the esports athletes to develop product. Today, we've got our teams flying alongside with them, testing our products. We've got our products being trialed in tournaments and stuff like that. And this is hugely competitive to the extent where we're talking about millisecond kind of competitive advantages that we need to kind of build on. So, you know, I do think that it's going to be, it's going to broaden. so it's not just going to be like first-person shooters or MOBAs that are going to be into eSports but pretty much all of digital entertainment you'll find some level of eSports happening at that point of time.

26:02Min, if I come here to Singapore again in a year's time and we're sat down talking what do you think we're going to be talking about? I think we will be talking about some of the new exciting games that have been built with AI and how we see the future from that. Maybe we might see one or two major hit games built from AI, from one-man teams or three-man teams or five-man teams, I actually think that is actually going to happen. And especially for maybe a country like Singapore, since we're talking about Singapore, where it's a huge race or tussle for talent over here, but we don't have a lot of space, right?

26:42We don't have a lot of a big population. I do think, especially for Singapore, being able to harness AI is going to be a massive, massive opportunity. Well, we'll talk in a year's time and let's see where we're at. Looking forward to it. Thanks so much for joining me. Thank you very much. Thank you. That's it for this episode of Beyond the Valley. This was part two of our special series. Thanks for listening and watching and we'll catch you next time.