The first Razerstore in Europe is an aspirational high-end retail space with a basement arena for e-sports. Rose Dykins reports
Razer has launched an experiential future-facing retail and community space for gamers – Razerstore at London Charing Cross.
A world-leading lifestyle brand for gamers, Singapore-based tech company Razer specialises in high-end computer hardware. The company commissioned experiential design company YourStudio to design their first European flagship store.
Ioana Iliesiu is a senior experiential designer at YourStudio. “Experiential design breaks down a guest’s journey through a space,” she says. “It’s not about broad strokes, but a granular experience. It’s a kind of emotional engineering that taps into psychology, colour theory – even taste theory – to give a more rewarding, complete experience.”
Razer wanted YourStudio to come up with a shopping concept that reflected how gaming has evolved to become an aspirational lifestyle choice with broad appeal.
“We detected different markets and mentalities we were designing for,” she says. “There were the gaming enthusiasts and the professional e-sports players who use the Razer tech. We also wanted to create something aspirational for young gamers.
YourStudio set out to create an immersive, high-end environment that was part-retail space, part community space. It needed to reflect how gaming has shifted to become as much of a spectator sport as a first-hand experience.
The 344 sqm space covers two floors, and is designed to gamify the shopping experience for customers, blurring the boundaries between the physical and the digital.
The ground-floor has a double-height ceiling monolithic concrete surfaces that make use of the height, and accentuates the changing LED aspects of the Razer technology.
The basement level of the flagship Razer store offers an aesthetic that mimics the brand’s signature Chroma lighting system, with grid-like lines of neon lighting, redolent of graphic lights found in retro games.
On the same floor is the e-sports mini arena. Customers can play on these individually, use them as part of the store’s programme of workshops, or they can be hired for tournaments.
“The arena can fit two teams of five, so there are ten computers facing each other that live feed onto a giant screen,” says Iliesiu. “This feeds up to the ground floor of the store, so visitors can see what’s going on and feel incentivised to go downstairs.”
Currently, Razerstore London is offering a curbside service shopping programme. Guests can order products via phone, email or Facebook Messenger, then collect them from the store two hours later.
London is also home to virtual reality gaming outpost Otherworld, demonstrating how this form of entertainment is moving away from living rooms to destinations in the outside world, opening up a whole new perspective on “gaming tourism”.
The space contains 14 immersion rooms each with VR and sensory effects, which include heat and wind. Visitors can choose from 16 different experiences and games, in which they wear innovative VIVE headsets.
E-sports studios from the likes of Razer and Otherworld prove that gaming tourism isn’t just a trend that is taking place within the digital realm – humans are also travelling to dedicated real-world hubs to plug and play.
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