Just before Christmas, sportswear giant Puma announced its first products designed explicitly for esports. Called "Active Gaming Footwear", these lightweight socks cost $105/£80 and are designed to be used indoors and in esports arenas, providing the comfort, support and grip that professional gamers need to compete at the highest level. This sounds to me like complete bollocks - and that's why I knew I needed to buy them.
You see, people have been selling utterly useless "pro gaming" gear for absolutely ages. Even in the early days of esports, when Twitch was still called Justin.tv and StarCraft 2 was the biggest game in the scene, professional players would be hauled in front of a camera to shill stuff like oversized, overpriced racing chairs or piss-yellow gaming glasses that made wearers look like off-brand rent-a-cops. Delivering their lines with the clumsy charisma of a professional footballer asked for their opinion on the Iran-Contra crisis, these folks would swear up and down that you too could make it to the big leagues if you plonked down $199 for a XtreemPro 360 gaming towel with extra sweat rivulets and an inner lining made from Mongolian yak hide.
I knew that it was all nonsense, but a small part of me still wanted to believe there was a grain of truth behind the marketing - that maybe you could find that critical one per cent of extra performance from an unexpected source. Now, I had the perfect chance to disabuse myself of that ridiculous notion once and for all - by ordering these shoes and actually testing them in-game.
from Eurogamer.net
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