The past two years have seen a huge amount of buyouts and mergers in the gaming industry, and now GN — parent company of well-known audio brand Jabra — has agreed to purchase gaming peripheral maker SteelSeries.
Announced as part of a joint press release today, the deal is valued at around $2 billion (AUD) as GN looks to bring another Danish company in SteelSeries under its umbrella. While SteelSeries and fellow GN subsidiary Jabra may not seem to have a ton of overlap, there should be some potential to share and boost research and development for both Jabra’s and SteelSeries’ audio products, which range from budget Bluetooth headphones to high-end gaming headsets and more.
In a statement regarding the deal, SteelSeries CEO Ehtisham Rabbani said: “We’re on a mission to continually push boundaries in esports and gaming with world-class products and software, and now, with the backing of GN, we’ll be able to turbo charge these efforts.”
Rabbani also added that while GN will be its new parent company, SteelSeries will continue to operate independently.
While not quite as well known as its more popular subsidiaries, GN has been actually been around for 150 years and is credited with being one of the first companies to market mobile Bluetooth headsets.
And SteelSeries has made a handful of its own acquisitions in the last year, including deals to purchase KontrolFreek and gaming audio specialist Nahimic, whose products have been featured in a range of high-end gaming notebooks throughout the years.
But the bigger picture is that with its agreement to buy SteelSeries, GN is continuing the trend of gaming acquisitions that has seen HP purchase HyperX, the buyouts of Elgato, Scuf, and Origin PC by Corsair, Logitech acquiring Blue, and many more — all within the last two years.
Gaming revenue has skyrocketed over the past 18 months due to the covid-19 pandemic forcing more people to stay indoors and rely on gaming as a big source of entertainment, so the consolidation of gaming accessory makers makes sense. And while the $2 billion deal for SteelSeries is one of the largest buyouts we’ve seen so far, so many gaming brands are continuing to merge that it probably won’t be the last.
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