Phil 'needs' this chair. Not for his back nor for 'gaming', but to pad his ego after the OPSeat fiasco. I predict another speedrun + DSP Rant after Phil finds out he's being 'honey dicked' to sell marked up chairs folks can buy direct for $80...and doesn't see a penny after the hawkers hitch up their wagons and move on under a new name.
Now that we're onto the second "gaming chair" saga of January 2018 I feel that I can truly increase my autism when it comes to "gaming chairs":
I agree about the ego part, however the markup part isn't anything new or that groundbreaking. A huge number of websites and products operate around the exact same business model. "gamer chairs" are a fairly niche product if you're looking at scale, so their affiliate/discount/sponsorship practices are actually self-serving for both the chair companies and the customers (customers meaning people who want a decent, comfortable office chair without paying $1000).
So if you didn't have affiliate links/sponsorships then you probably wouldn't have gaming chairs to begin with because there's no market for them. Getting physical chairs in physical stores is hugely expensive (especially on a country-wide or international scale). Unless IKEA or someone came along and decided to make a chair that catered to gamers (meaning people who want a chair which offers adjustability as well as comfort).
The office chair market simply doesn't cater to teenagers and younger people, they sell their chairs to startup companies and CEOs who want an armrest with a decent cocaine compartment. The hardest thing to find in an office chair is decent adjustable armrests. If you can't adjust the armrests it can fuck you over.
If you want a high quality office chair you're looking at paying $500-$1000 or more but you can get a pretty decent one for $100-400 instead.
There's no real reason for office chairs to be so fucking astronomically expensive except that the companies that make the better ones know that they're selling to Fortune 500 companies so the prices can be as exceptional as they want them to be.
For me, I have a DXracer chair and previously I had some leather office chair I got because someone else didn't want it anymore. I've had other chairs from IKEA and other companies (nothing in the $500+ region though) and the DXRacer chair (despite its absolutely horrible branding) is actually pretty fucking good for what it costs.
If you read a lot of threads about "gaming chairs" most people agree that they're pretty good value for money and pretty comfortable (horrible branding aside).
If you want to spend more money than a "gaming chair" (meaning a chair with adjustable armpads and decent options for height/angle) a lot of people suggest Herman Miller:
That's right, the base model, with no adjustable lumbar support, no tilt limiter, no adjustable arms is $780.
If you want to add in shit like adjustable arms, it comes to $1,128.
I'm sure that "gaming chairs" probably start to break after 1-2 years of use, but we're talking a difference in pricing of $700+
Its amazing that DSP, despite having to spend so much time on his computer has never invested in a decent chair though, and would rather wait to get one for free. His "loveseat" (as I've posted about before) has to be extremely bad for his posture/back to begin with. No person working in an office or using a computer for extended periods of time would ever use a fucking sofa to sit on (unless they had it positioned quite differently than DSP).
