It has been announced that Corsair has acquired Drop (previously Massdrop), a peripherals company known for developing products based on demand from its own community. Previous successful ‘drops’ include officially licensed The Lord of The Rings and Marvel Infinity Saga keycaps, along with Sennheiser HD 6XX headphones and the company’s own Drop CTRL Mechanical Keyboard. The deal is cash-only with the terms not being made public.
Speaking about the deal, Andy Paul, Founder and CEO of Corsair said, ‘Personalized Keyboards that can be modified by the consumer is one of the fastest growing trends in the gaming peripheral space. Drop has proven to be one of the leaders in this space and with Corsair’s global footprint, we expect to significantly grow the Drop brand worldwide.’
Meanwhile, CEO of Drop, Jef Holove described Corsair as ‘the ideal partner to help Drop grow and continue to fulfill its purpose of creating amazing community-driven products’. Also adding that ‘with a worldwide sales and logistics footprint, we’ll be able to make Drop products more widely available, faster, while retaining the enthusiast-led product development that has seen millions of fans trust Drop for their setup and hardware.’
While the shuffling around of brands within the gaming PC space is often only of modest interest to most users, this Drop acquisition feels particularly significant given the community-led development of many of Drop’s previous products and its previous work with direct competitors to Corsair. Past ‘drops’ include products by Sennheiser and HiFiman, amongst others, so it seems unlikely Corsair would continue to want to push buyers towards those other brands.
We asked Corsair about its plans for continued cooperation with other brands, to which they replied:
‘Drop.com will continue to operate via its own website. While we expect to explore wider opportunities for selling Drop products via the Corsair global sales channel, the drop.com website will remain distinct from Corsair, in a similar fashion to SCUF, Elgato and Origin PC.
We’ll be evaluating the non-keyboard aspects of the business as time goes on but will be making no changes immediately.’
Have any of you participated in the Drop community or bought any of the resulting products? If so, we’d love to hear your thoughts on this acquisition. Feel free to get in touch via the Custom PC Facebook page, via Twitter, or join our Custom PC and Gaming Setup Facebook group and tap into the knowledge of our 390,000+ members.