Razer CEO Says Gamers Love AI Game Development, They Just Don’t Realize It Yet
Min-Liang Tan's response starts on some fairly strong footing: "What are we unhappy with? When I say we, I mean us as gamers. I think we're unhappy with generative AI slop, right? Just to put it out there. And that's something I'm unhappy with. Like any gamer, when I play a game, I want to be engaged, I wanna be immersed, I wanna be able to be competitive. I don't want to be served character models with extra fingers and stuff like that, or shoddily-written storylines, so on and so forth. I think for us, we're all aligned against gen AI slop that is just churned out from a couple of prompts and stuff like that."
He continues with, "What we aren't against, at least, from my perspective, are tools that help augment or support, and help game developers make great games. And I think that's fundamentally what we are talking about at Razer, right? So if we've got AI tools that can help game developers QA their games faster, better, and weed out the bugs, I think, along the way, we're all aligned, and we would love that. If we could get game developers to have the opportunity to create better, to check through typos and things like that, to create better games, I think we all want that. So I think that's the way I see it."
Even for outspoken critics of generative AI, these responses read as reasonable and nuanced statements. By themselves, they would have been unlikely to prompt any backlash, though the interview is quite a bit longer than just that question and that answer. Prior to it, Razer's use of Grok for the glass-jarred waifu hologram Project Ava and some other AI-infused projects drew criticism, which Min-Liang Tan defended against.
Where things become more controversial is where the Razer CEO begins to contradict himself and arguably promotes generative AI anyway, or at least the content generation tools used to produce it. "So, with the amount of slop out there, we're going to see some level of art rise to the top, and that kind of art may still be created with the same tools that created the slop, but with great care, with great discernment, to be able to do something truly different. The difference will come from human ingenuity, not from countless prompt mashing, so to speak."
The full interview has a heavy AI focus in line with Razer's showing at CES 2026, but some other topics come up too. Before the AI boom swept across the industry and took over the "Consumer" Electronics Show, Razer was best known as a manufacturer of gaming laptops, accessories, and peripherals that it is still selling today. Min-Liang Tan expressed concerns about the rising memory and storage prices that have hit the industry, confessing that "We haven't announced the prices for the next round of laptops, for example, and this is something that concerns me because the RAM prices are going up, and we want to be able to make sure our laptops remain affordable and within the reach of gamers out there. [...] It is bad. It is bad right now."
