Gamer Gear: Meet the folks of SteelSeries! Pt.2

Gamer Gear: Meet the folks of SteelSeries! Pt.2

By Jordan "Doomhammer" Kahn and Jerry "LordJerith" Prochazka

I'm gonna be on a plane headed to Comic-Con International in a couple days, and have a lot of packing to do, so I'm just gonna turn today's blog post over to the folks of vVv Gaming again:

Last week, in the first part of vVv's interview with SteelSeries' Chief Marketing Officer, Kim
Rom, Kim said something that we have been thinking about: "When there is enough people that have a shared passion and a shared interest in something...that's when people start following." To a great degree, we think this epitomizes vVv gaming as well as SteelSeries.

Read more after the jump!

When I was looking over my notes from the video shoot (I had the task of cataloguing each take to aid the editor in post-production), I realized that just as SteelSeries had "changed the way technology works to accommodate what we believe would make someone a better gamer," so did vVv create a model for how a competitive gaming organization could be structured and operated in order to cut costs, build fans, provide sponsors with more value, ensure a broad reach and improve competitive gaming as a whole. This new model is about the value of each member not just about having top players. Every member of the vVv community must add value. We don't bring people into the community just for the sake of bringing people into the community, just as SteelSeries doesn't make a product glow green, just to have it glow green. SteelSeries creates products that they want to use, and vVv Gaming created an organization and operates a competitive gaming community where we want to hang out and a community that we want to be part of ourselves. The parallels are obvious.

Of course, as I mentioned in my last piece about the first video, it's not just the parallel of the
companies but also of the people. During one of my first meetings with Jerry (vVv LordJerith), he talked about a human capital management plan that was at the heart of vVv Gaming. At the time, I didn't even know what those words meant, and I certainly had no idea what that had to do with a competitive gaming organization. Listening to Kim Rom speak, I realized what Jerry had meant when he told me, "Any company can have the temporary advantages of better buildings, furniture, technology and money, but the only sustainable competitive advantage is human capital. In other words, it's the people in the company or the organization that give it the edge."

SteelSeries has that edge. That is what makes them a great partner. The human capital management plan Jerry first told me about when I accepted my position, the very plan that I have been a part of over the last year, has come full circle. The way we market vVv, the way we choose our partners, our application process and the reason we cut members is all about purpose, value and quality. vVv doesn't have top teams just to have top teams in the same way that SteelSeries doesn't create products just to meet a price point in the market. What
both companies do is share a vision of quality and performance that I am proud to be a part of.

Here is part 2 of our 3-part video series with Kim Rom, CMO of SteelSeries: