There’s more to Mad Catz than headsets and controllers. Global PR and communications manager Alex Verrey tells James Batchelor how the firm has reinvented itself
Mad Catz is one of the longest- running peripherals companies. What is the key to your success? We don’t even consider ourselves as an accessories company anymore – we’re an entertainment company. Any business has to adapt and evolve or you risk becoming extinct. Mad Catz today is unrecognisable to the company we were ten years ago. We used to focus on the commodities market: controllers, memory cards and so on. But we saw a few years ago that this was tailing off for us. It’s becoming much harder to be distinctive in this area. So we made a very conscious decision to shy away from that and focus on speciality products for the passionate gamer – and that’s what we’re about today. It’s been wildly successful for us and it’s definitely the future direction we’re taking.
What was the highlight of your Mad Catz Unveiled event? We showed off Damage Inc: Pacific Squadron WWIIand most people – rightfully, I suppose – don’t associate us with video game publishing. But there we were introducing our own game alongside our bespoke hardware, the AV8R flight stick. Mad Catz is also the publisher of Rock Band 3and sole manufacturer of that game’s hardware so it shows how diverse we are as a company. The object of Unveiled was to show people this. We wanted to educate people about everything we do.
How do your hero products epitomise what Mad Catz is today? A good example is our fight sticks. When we announced a few years ago that we were working with Capcom on the official Street Fighter IVfight sticks, the hardcore gaming community was nervous. They were convinced that Capcom had made a mistake, that we weren’t going to be able to deliver.
28 July 27th 2012
And yet here we are, the world’s biggest provider of fight sticks. They’re true hero products for our company, they set a new standard for us and changed what people think of when they see Mad Catz. The hero products of the future will be things like our Tritton Warhead 7.1 headset, which is a flagship product for us. We expect that to be a best-seller this Christmas.
The headsets market is extremely competitive. How do you keep up with companies like Turtle Beach? You have to remain laser-focused on who your audience is, and ours is the core gamer. Unlike other companies in the headset market, we’re not concerned about making lifestyle products, we’re concerned about the gamer. That’s what Tritton is all about. We have officially licensed Xbox 360 headsets and that’s enormously important for us. Nobody else has that, and no one has a product like the Warhead 7.1. No one else is using Microsoft’s security chip to interact directly with the console. It’s truly wireless and all of that sets it apart from the competition.
Why is the Microsoft partnership so important to Mad Catz? In essence, ours are the only official Xbox 360 headsets in the world. There are plenty of companies with other Xbox headsets, but we wanted to do something that was very distinctive for the Xbox 360 gamer. We’re delighted to be working with Microsoft on this official range. We also recently announced we’re working with Microsoft on some Halo 4headsets. Microsoft is a very valued partner and we’re delighted to be working with them. We’re actually working with all three platform holders on official products. In fact, we had the Wii U Kunai headset at Unveiled, which I
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believe was the first Wii U headset to be announced. We’re very keen to work with the platform holders in creating and pushing their products and expanding on the range of core gaming products available for those platforms. The fact that we’re working with all three shows how far we’ve come as a company and that we’re a very different Mad Catz to what we were ten years ago.
Mad Catz today is unrecognisable to the company we
were ten years ago. Alex Verrey, Mad Catz
Unveiled gave Mad Catz the chance to show off its hottest high-end products
You’re next big software release is Damage Inc. Pacific Squadron WWII. What is the long-term goal for your publishing team? What we learned from publishing Rock Band is that creating unique experiences is very important to Mad Catz. It’s about marrying hardware to software and creating something unique. Damage Incis perfectly playable with a standard controller but it’s best played with the bespoke flight stick. If we’ve got an idea for hardware but don’t have the perfect software to work with alongside it, let’s create our own software. It’s about controlling our destiny through the perfect marriage of hardware and software. We’ve got some more software announcements just around the corner.