Finally Ready to Take the Plunge: Gaming Chair Thread

KaNesDeath said:
Companies exist that purchase closed downed businesses furniture for resale.
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Yes, couldn’t locate any close by. Any I found had shipping costs that didn’t make sense to me. I have a Herman Miller at work, and have at various jobs for awhile. They’re nice but too much for my house.
 
Terry Noonan said:
Yes, couldn’t locate any close by. Any I found had shipping costs that didn’t make sense to me. I have a Herman Miller at work, and have at various jobs for awhile. They’re nice but too much for my house.
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I personally hate that style of chair, and even if you lucked out to find one cheaply, it would almost certainly be their most common mid-back model. There's a reason they want that for offices. Don't know why anyone would find that satisfactory for a gaming chair.
 
Yeah these are the mid back ones I’m use to. I like them as I sit all day in them but no headrest sucks.
Madmick said:
I personally hate that style of chair, and even if you lucked out to find one cheaply, it would almost certainly be their most common mid-back model. There's a reason they want that for offices. Don't know why anyone would find that satisfactory for a gaming chair.
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Madmick said:
No.

Most of the bestselling chairs you see on places like Amazon are, but not Secret Lab. They're based in Singapore, not China. The have two assembly plants in the USA: one in Tennessee that services the east coast, and one in Utah that services the west coast. These offer domestic customer service support.

Most of the cheap gaming and office chairs from China have no company foothold here, or nothing more than some closet-sized window "office" with a phone in it so they can claim an address. It's easy to tell which these are because the chairs won't even ship from that location. This is the first of your tells. The easiest way to tell the cheap chairs from the good chairs are three:
  1. Where is the headquarters (i.e. not China), and do they have a separate domestic presence for customer service and returns?
  2. What is the warranty on the chair?
  3. How much does the chair weigh? (not the weight capacity-- the weight itself)

Almost every bestseller you see on Amazon fails #1 right off the bat. This might seem unfair because it's blanketing, because a few Chinese companies are trying to be competitive at the higher end, but it's a minefield trying to pick them out from the rest unless you want to spend your day peeling through return policies and business registrations, and even then...good luck. A second minefield is that even among these more ambitious companies they often only really make an effort with a few models out of dozens. The rest-- almost their entire inventories-- are crap.

For example, NBA star Gordon Hayward has a deal with a company called "Autofull" based in Beijing which is actually owned by the supergiant Xiaomi. His chair and a few others from them offer a 2-year limited warranty, and even a lifetime warranty on the steel frames; though that doesn't mean much-- the steel is not the part that will break. Same goes for GTRacing which is based in Shanghai and their best chairs. However, for both, most of their chairs offer a pitiful 30-day warranty. Furthermore, they don't cover shipping within warranty. Finally, they use courier services to handle shipping and returns which indicates they don't have a real USA presence.

Warranty is key. I almost spit my coffee all over my computer when I saw "30-day warranty" for Amazon's bestselling office chair. Almost every chair on their top lists offers 30 days, 90 days, or if you're damn lucky, 1-year. That's unacceptable. Look for 2-years at a minimum. Secret Lab offers a limited 3-year warranty, and like a few other companies, they expand this to 5-years if you simply jump through the hoop of taking a picture of your chair after assembling it and posting it your social media with the hashtag #SecretLab. I really like this idea. Win-win. They get marketing, you get a better warranty for free.

Third, look at the weights. Most of these cheap chairs, even those boasting a higher weight capacity, range from 20-35 pounds, and there's no correlation to the quoted weight capacity. That's one of the reasons you know that the quoted weight capacity is dreamed up by the manufacturer, and doesn't mean anything. There's no standard. Given, you can make a sturdy chair with less weight if you have incredible design (ex. Herman Miller, Steelcase). However, generally speaking, the lighter chairs are chairs where the manufacturer cheaped out. I got the Secret Lab Titan XL. It weighs 79.4 lbs fully assembled: an absolute tank. Most of the best chairs weighed between 55 lbs to this 79.4 lbs (which was the heaviest I saw).

It isn't a coincidence that the companies that tend to charge more didn't just do one of the things above, but almost always got all three right, and vice versa for those garbage Chinese chairs which failed all three.

Secret Lab (Singapore), Maxnomic (USA), Noblechairs (Germany), Vertagear (England), and DXRacer (Sweden) are examples of solid companies. I also noticed Cooler Master (Taiwan) offers a gaming chair. One of the only Chinese chairs I noticed that was solid was the AKRacing Master Series Max. Five year limited warranty, 68 pound weight, and they sell through Wal-Mart which is attractive because you get the security of Wal-Mart's return policies and customer service.
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Very informative, thanks. I had one of these:

OIP.yZ8tffzwzSvZDHYgXjxbkAHaHa


I believe they're a UK company. Paid £230 or so and it was decent. I think I'd stick to an office chair next time, though.
 
The Bloody Nine said:
Very informative, thanks. I had one of these:

OIP.yZ8tffzwzSvZDHYgXjxbkAHaHa


I believe they're a UK company. Paid £230 or so and it was decent. I think I'd stick to an office chair next time, though.
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So it goes. There is always the matter of preference.

Which is why I'm apprehensive of a lot of the rhetoric surrounding this topic you see on online forums like Reddit which have generated a bizarre flag-waving mindset that have situated people into camps like fans cheering for a sports team. The newly minted office chair snobs conflate the cheap gaming chairs with the entire market, or wholly attribute Chinese manufacturing to poor quality. They've convinced themselves they're more enlightened because they see through a marketing racket. Sigh. Meanwhile, you can find all those same mesh-style mid-back office chairs mimicking Herman Miller's groundbreaking design, typically sold between $300-$600 here in the states, for ~$25-$150 on Alibaba. China is manufacturing a huge number of them with a huge markup, too. They often carry the same pitiful warranties.

There's a reason Herman Miller or Steelcase chairs cost $1,500-$2000, and while everyone online seems to know all these wonderful Shangri-La outlets where you can find them cheaply, I've never found such a place near me IRL. These Herman Millers that exist in the wild for >$600 are unicorns to me.
 
I sat in a chair made by Emerge (never heard of them before) at Microcenter and it was comfy. But it was only $150 and felt kinda light.
 
I have a Vertagear chair. My thoughts on it are that it makes for an awful PC gaming chair but is okay for my living room. The poor support and perfunctory head pillow made for an awful experience anytime that I was sitting at my desk. My tail bone would actually hurt after maybe an hour. It was just no good for maintaining my posture when using kb/m for even moderate stretches.

Playing on controller where I'm constantly switching posture and moving around isn't bad though. I wouldn't say it's great, but it's also not uncomfortable.
 
JoeyJoeJoeJr said:
so after using it 4 hours the first day

MY ASS KILLS!!!

I really hope it softens up soon because it was painful to sit in after awhile
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Haha that's my only gripe with my Titan - if I sit for too long my ass hurts when I stand up. It feels fine when I'm actually in it though.
 
Shoemaker said:
Haha that's my only gripe with my Titan - if I sit for too long my ass hurts when I stand up. It feels fine when I'm actually in it though.
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Glad this thread is still going! Still rocking my Titan and still absolutely loving it. And yes, my only gripe as well is the fact that it is perfectly fine when sitting in it for an 8 hour work day followed by 4+ hours of gaming, but boy, when I come up stairs and sit on my comfy couch my ass DOES hurt.

Chair still feels like it did day 1. Well worth spending actual money on a chair this time IMO. Herman Millers are on my radar though! Have 3 kids now so need to hand down another chair in a few years and buy another. Maybe if I get a good deal I will give one a go :)
 
Real talk on gaming chairs versus office chairs and then two recommendations at end: (time to watch is 1m)

​
 
Valhoven said:
Real talk on gaming chairs versus office chairs and then two recommendations at end: (time to watch is 1m)

​
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Frankly, this video is nonsense. He offers no evidence or materially cogent framework of reasoning to back his claims. The entire premise for his opinion is that office chairs are more comfortable for long-term use because "capitalism" is very good at maximizing the productivity of workers. Of course, if one is capable of an iota of deductive reasoning, one realizes how absurd this is.

Why? Well, the chair companies who sell chairs to corporations suffer no detriment, nor enjoy increased profits, based on how comfortable or productive the workers are. There is zero profit-performance link there. Second, many corporations cheap out on the chairs they provide which is why so many in office spaces buy their own chair for themselves. Third, corporations figured out long ago that comfort isn't necessarily their principal concern when seeking to maximize the profitability of their employees. That's true as far as their concern for the mental or emotional state of their employees, not just the physical one. Their chief concern as far as the physical well-being of employees is that it doesn't ultimately cost them more in associated health care fees.

This website seeks to capitalize on chairs it notes as the best ones for purchase, but it discloses this affiliate relationship. Furthermore, while sponsorship likely plays a key role in why certain streamers use the chairs they do, who often use their chairs more than 10+ hours a day, most of the top streamers make enough they could easily afford to forego a minor sponsorship deal from a chair company in the interest of their own comfort.
https://topgamingchair.com/gaming-chairs-that-popular-streamers-youtubers-use/
Ever wondered what gaming chairs those pro gamers, YouTubers and streamers all use? Me too, so I conducted a study of 85 of the most popular YouTubers and streamers to find out, and I’m going to share the results with you right here.

So, what is the number one gaming chair that popular streamers and YouTubers use? It turns out that it’s the Secretlab Titan. More popular YouTubers and streamers use the Secretlab Titan than any other gaming chair, according to the results of this study. However, Secretlab isn’t the most popular gaming chair brand on the market. That title belongs to DXRacer, which is the brand of choice for more than a quarter of all the influencers in this study.

The Results of the Study at a Glance
Here are the main takeaways from this study:

  • DXRacer is the most popular brand – it’s the brand of choice for more than a quarter (26.8%) of YouTubers and Streamers
  • The Secretlab Titan chair is the most popular chair model – 7 popular influencers (8.2%) use this exact model of chair
  • Almost a fifth of YouTubers and Streamers used a chair from a non-gaming chair brand – 19.6% of YouTubers/streamers in this study used either a Herman Miller chair (15.9%) or an Ikea chair (3.7%)
  • The top 3 brands command the majority of the influencer market share – The majority of YouTubers/Streamers use chairs from one of just three brands: DXRacer (26.8%), Herman Miller (15.9%), and Secretlab (12.2%). Collectively, these brands account for 54.9% of chairs used by YouTubers and Streamers.
  • I identified 12 different brands used by streamers and YouTubers – after discounting chairs for which the brand wasn’t definitively identifiable, I found 12 different brands used by YouTubers and streamers
  • I identified 28 different chairs used by streamers and YouTubers – there were 28 different models/Series of chairs identified in this study, excluding those for which the exact model of the chair could not be identified.
Click to expand...
 
Madmick said:
Frankly, this video is nonsense. He offers no evidence or materially cogent framework of reasoning to back his claims. The entire premise for his opinion is that office chairs are more comfortable for long-term use because "capitalism" is very good at maximizing the productivity of workers. Of course, if one is capable of an iota of deductive reasoning, they realize how absurd this is.

Why? Well, the chair companies who sell chairs to corporations suffer no detriment, nor enjoy increased profits, based on how comfortable or productive the workers are. There is zero profit-performance link there. Second, many corporations cheap out on the chairs they provide which is why so many in office spaces buy their own chair for themselves. Third, corporations figured out long ago that comfort isn't necessarily their principal concern when seeking to maximize the profitability of their employees. That's true as far as their concern for the mental or emotional state of their employees, not just the physical one. Their chief concern as far as the physical well-being of employees is that it doesn't ultimately cost them more in associated health care fees.

This website seeks to capitalize on chairs it notes as the best ones for purchase, but it discloses this affiliate relationship. Furthermore, while sponsorship likely plays a key role in why certain streamers use the chairs they do, who often use their chairs more than 10+ hours a day, most of the top streamers make enough they could easily afford to forego a minor sponsorship deal from a chair company in the interest of their own comfort.
https://topgamingchair.com/gaming-chairs-that-popular-streamers-youtubers-use/
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I don't think that degree of rigour was uploader's goal given the some 50-second runtime and platform uploaded to; rather, that people in the market for gaming chairs are equally or better served looking into office chairs.

Uploader probably spends more time coiffing his hair than I'm interested in defending him (don't know the guy) but I think that takeaway alone is helpful for any who think gaming chairs as marketed have ergonomics what have you unique to gaming.

I remember Jefferz, for example, recommending in the past an expensive office chair over any gaming chair for the pastime so it was in that spirit I wanted to share above tweet.
 
Secretlab reveals new League of Legends Jhin Edition for their Titan Evo model.

Have a Secretlab chair myself and can vouch for their quality as well as lumbar support. (I recommend NeueChair instead if lumbar is your #1 prio though, which I use for home office.) Took a screengrab of Jhin Edition for the crew (below) but best viewed on-page here.

 
My Secretlab chair is still going strong AF. I usually switch chairs by now, but it just holds up amazingly well and just "gets me". I do have an armrest that is chipping, but the chair feels the same since day 1. Only thing I have done to it is I bought rubber roller blade wheels to replace factory wheels for less wear and tear on my hardwood floor.

My third kid is becoming of age to get his own PC built for him soon enough, and when that happens in about 2-ish years, I may upgrade to a Herman Miller Aeron... MAYBE.... Some of the themed chairs that Secretlab make are beautiful though and I have had my eye on a Harry Potter one... so we shall see :)
 
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