Razer's Min-Liang Tan: AI to turn $188.8B gaming into trillion-dollar market

Razer spent two decades building a cult following around gaming hardware, with a brand identity tied to its three-headed snake logo and a fanbase willing to tattoo it on themselves. That era is now framing a harder pivot. Tan, a lawyer by training who built the Boomslang mouse with American businessman Robert Krakoff in 1999, has long argued that everyone would eventually become a gamer. His latest claim extends that logic: the industry's roughly $188.8 billion in revenue last year is a floor, not a ceiling, and AI is the mechanism he believes gets it to a trillion dollars.

The shift is partly structural. Razer went private in 2022 with CVC Capital Partners after five years on Hong Kong's stock exchange, which Tan says freed him from quarterly reporting and let the company pursue 'cognitive gaming' without public-market scrutiny. That freedom is visible in the product lineup: a wearable headset with cameras and multi-model AI compatibility, a desktop companion with avatars that have scripted personalities, and a game-testing tool.

But the same AI that Razer is betting on is already reshaping the games market in ways that may be harder to control. Studies find that one in five games released on Steam last year disclosed generative AI use, and separate research suggests AI-made games account for up to 90% of growth in monthly releases. Almost none make money. Tan's response is to position Razer on the quality side of that divide, with tools aimed at fixing bad AI output rather than adding to it.