The PC has always been everything to everybody. HP is very focused on selling AI PCs, as evidenced by its lineup in January at the CES 2025 tech trade show in Las Vegas.
And yet the PC is also the platform of choice for content creators and gamers. Players are crossing lines from just being passively entertained to creating their own custom games with the help of AI. Blending all the necessary tools together to make software work seamlessly is one of the things that computer makers like HP have to do.
And the company is going to be busy this year. It showed off designs for a bunch of laptops, workstations and desktops at CES, and now it’s starting to deliver machines with a set of graphics card refreshes that starting launching this week.
I caught up with Jo Tan, senior vice president of gaming solutions at HP, recently to talk about the business of gaming PCs and how technologies, markets and games are all coming together in the AI era.
Tan said HP’s strategy with gaming PCs is to use the right tech to power games so consumers can compete, escape to new worlds, or socially connect with others.
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
GamesBeat: Can you talk about the strategy in your part of the business?
Jo Tan: It’s pretty simple and straightforward. We’re using technology to power games, to be able to have immersive gameplay experiences. Whether it’s to compete or to escape or to socially connect with others.
GamesBeat: This week, is there a lot of implementation going on around that strategy? Are there insights you have into products that are coming out right now?
Tan: This is a unique year. We have a new graphics refresh. That potential will enable not just gameplay, but it works very well with the new generative AI trend we see. That’s making game creation a lot easier. The other piece is, gamers are also blogger. They want to create special moments and capture them. Now there are tools to do that with generative AI and powerful graphics hardware. It’s more than just buying a gaming device. It’s buying a high-performance device that can enable you to create content, so you can socially connect with your fans and friends.
GamesBeat: From the announcements, Nvidia’s 8X improvement in DLSS 4 makes me think. We kind of just got a new console upgrade without realizing it. The PC got a whole lot better.
Tan: It used to be that game content demanded so much graphics power that you wouldn’t be able to see the details of animation and graphics that you wanted to see in games. Now we have the hardware horsepower to do that. It’s becoming more real.
GamesBeat: We were getting used to 5% or 10% improvements.
Tan: Now it’s a big step function improvement, right? Now you have the hardware horsepower to do the work you want to do in a shorter amount of time, and it’s so much easier. Before, if you wanted to create graphics, you had to go through hours of training to learn the apps. Now, with AI, a lot of apps are making it easy and intuitive to do the same things in a shorter amount of time.
GamesBeat: Productivity improvements for creators–
Tan: It’s dramatic. Because of that improvement, I think we’ll see people creating more content, and more interesting content. Digital content has become important. The next wave we see–in the game environment, people care about things like skins. When you play a game, you want to be different. Each gamer wants something unique to them. Now, with all this horsepower, you can create skins that are uniquely yours.
GamesBeat: We just had a story run about StreamElements. They worked together with some folks to build an AI creator studio. They give the solo creator as much of a production team boost as someone who has a dozen people working for them.
Tan: Exactly. Then you think about the next trend, where younger people right now are going into more freelancing kinds of work. They want to have more control of their own work life. A tool like this, with the kind of horsepower that’s becoming available, you can have a career, your dream career. Become an influencer and create content.
GamesBeat: Is there research showing that intersection between content creators and gamers? That a large percentage of gamers want to be content creators?
Tan: There’s a lot of research. That’s why we have this saying, that a gamer is also a blogger. People watch other players play games. They want to hear about how other players win. And players want to show their audiences the special moments when they win, when they advance. To me, those special moments–when you go up a level, you want to create content and tell the whole wide world. I’m level 32 now!
GamesBeat: You’re showing that you’re authentic. You’re credible because you can show, “I’ve gotten this far.”
Tan: And the moment when you get there. You’re not only sharing content, but you’re sharing emotion. That makes it real. One thing we found out during COVID–a lot of people kept saying that you couldn’t replace face to face experiences with virtual ones. But there are more and more tools that help bridge that gap. You can’t replace it 100%. I agree with that. But using tools to bridge that gap, you can share those special moments in real time.
GamesBeat: It’s getting more sophisticated on the creator side. They’re creating their own Vtuber personas, virtual content creators.
Tan: And integrating content. People used to share their moments in the form of just a screen capture and a few words. Now it’s more sophisticated. Now there are in-game effects. The comments and emotions and personalization around it, there are many tools that allow you to do that. These tools require a higher-performance device.
GamesBeat: How do people learn and catch up and get out to this edge where they understand what all these tools are capable of? They have all these advantages now.
Tan: Social community. That’s why gamers are the group that is most active in social community. In the past, if people wanted to learn new things, they’d search. Now social community–TikTok is the new search.
GamesBeat: Show me how to use this AI.
Tan: Right. You can have an influencer teach you how to do this, step by step. And AI is fueled by data. It learns the kinds of questions you ask and perfects the answers for you. It helps you connect the dots and find information more effectively.
GamesBeat: Gamers can learn better now.
Tan: Correct. That’s why there’s a lot of AI coaching tools becoming available. One thing gamers always struggle with, when you get to a new game, how do you stay excited with it long enough? Now there are tools to help you get there quickly. Once you get hooked, you’ll continue to play that game.
GamesBeat: How much do you have to put into the tools yourselves in order to deliver this package to gamers? Are you going to have to bundle more things into PCs, or tell them about the third parties they can access?
Tan: I think of it with a different word. It’s more about integrating stuff more quickly. One thing we announced this week is called Omen AI. We know gamers care about performance. But performance has so many layers. Performance is more than just having the best hardware. It’s about how you integrate hardware and software together. That’s one more step. How do you make hardware and software – which includes the OS – and game settings all work seamlessly together? How do you make that easy for people to use?
That’s what we did with Omen AI. We’re taking the hardware data we already have, the OS and driver settings that we get from working with all the silicon providers as well as Microsoft. Then the next step is taking the game settings and integrating them to optimize the environment for you to play your games. And do this with one click. There are many tools that allow you to manually select this, but one thing we kept hearing from gamers: “Can you help me seamlessly do all these tasks without all the headache?”
That seamless connectivity is super important. And it can refer to playing a game or how you work with peripherals. It’s just like wireless. Everyone likes wireless because you don’t have wires and cables to mess you up when you move around. But what everyone hates about wireless is going into Bluetooth settings and dealing with pairing. You have to do all kinds of things. There are many steps to go through to make sure the experience is right. We decided, because gamers care about latency–we integrated this on both HyperX and PC. All you need to do is power on and it connects.
GamesBeat: With HyperX you can customize your mouse and keyboard to reflect your personality.
Tan: Right. The new mice that we’ve launched–mouse speed and accuracy are very important. But one thing that’s just as important is how you hold the mouse. Gamers have their own way of using a mouse, activating a mouse, for each game they play. We find that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Given our strength in 3D printing, we developed a way whereby you can customize the shell of your mouse and replace parts so that it fits just for you. Now you have all the technology you need to make sure that you have the best performance and the best comfort.
GamesBeat: Is that the area of gaming products where you find the most customization, the HyperX category?
Tan: That, as well as lighting. Last year we launched a mic product with more than 100 LEDs. Many people asked me why that mattered. Why do you need that many LEDs? I mentioned earlier about how the gamer is also a blogger. They connect with their community all the time, and the first thing you see when you connect is the mic. It’s not their PC or their keyboard. The mic is what’s right in front of the camera. It’s important to ensure audio quality, so the message is transmitted in a way that gets people excited, but emotion is important as well. Emotion comes through vision. The lighting effects on the mic–if you connect that with the in-game effects, it’s the best way to share that emotional experience.
GamesBeat: The Gen Z audience seems to be one of the most interesting targets for this technology.
Tan: Right. They’re starting very young. We also see that people who are interested in gaming, especially the younger generation, use gaming as a way to train their reflexes. Gamers have better reflexes, I feel. When you play games, you have to coordinate your hands, your eyes, your hearing. You have to do all that automatically. I find that one of the new trends is people using games as a way to train their reflexes well.
GamesBeat: Gamers of this generation have been hard to reach. They’re very focused on things like Roblox and Fortnite, and they don’t watch TV. Brands out there are all over TV, but now they’re realizing that there’s a whole generation of people that TV doesn’t reach at all. Within a generation that’s going to be gone. What do you think about that, the differences between generations and what you have to do because of that?
Tan: That’s why we’ve started putting energy and investment into connecting with them socially, in their communities. Gamers are connecting automatically in their communities. Like you said, they don’t watch TV. They don’t watch the news. They follow influencers and they learn from each other. Some of them even mask their own identities, but that doesn’t matter. They share a common interest. For the people who love Fortnite, they’re connecting to learn how to play Fortnite faster and better. It doesn’t matter to them whether they know each other as individuals. They just automatically connect.
We need to find a way to connect with this group of people so we get direct feedback from them on what they like and don’t like, so we can design the right solutions for them. For the last year, we’ve been spending our energy on looking at ways to connect directly with this group of people. Now you can find Omen PCs and HyperX on Instagram and Facebook. We manage those channels. You can even buy our products through them. Once they connect and learn about the products, the next thing is, they don’t go to a website to look them up anymore. Like I said, TikTok and Instagram are the new search. They learn about the product and buy the product from there.
It’s a very different world. We need to go where gamers are, where the new trends are. Making sure we get real time feedback is super important to us. Otherwise we’ll be designing solutions in a dark room without knowing what’s happening outside.
GamesBeat: I take it marketing for gamers is changing rapidly as well.
Tan: In the past you’d see people doing a lot of ad campaigns. Now, no. Gamers follow through social media, through influencers. It’s important for us to know how to reach them. Working directly with influencers is super important, and not just to sell products. It’s about telling a story, sharing a story. How do we put solutions together? Why do we design things in a certain way? Like I just said, why do we need 3D printing for new mouse shells? Why is that important? Because we find that fit is important, more than just the best technology for the best pointing rate.
GamesBeat: Kevin showed me the Google TV app on the gaming monitors.
Tan: Right, so that you can stream. You can use the monitor to play games as well.
GamesBeat: It makes sense, because there’s so much more gaming content on Netflix now. You have the Madden documentary on Amazon Prime. All this content is there. Maybe they’re playing a game, but then when they’re off, they’re watching a show about games.
Tan: Exactly. Then they want items that are related to that game. Think about Fortnite. They even have fashion designs now. Once people fall in love with the characters, they want something related to them. We’ve started seeing so many collaborations. Fortnite is collaborating with all kinds of brands for different products. You play the game, but you’re almost living in the game.
GamesBeat: How does this come back to affect you, this transmedia effect that’s taking gaming across movies and TV? You have to make all this content accessible to everyone through your products.
Tan: For us, again, we’re a hardware company. Our strength is in hardware design. One trend that we’re seeing right now–you can play the same games on many different devices. It used to be that a given game title would work on PlayStation and Xbox only. Another game might only be on PC. Now the same game can work across everything. Fortnite works everywhere from your mobile phone to your TV. But the experiences are still different.
One thing we’re working to solve is how you make the hardware, regardless of what platform you use–HyperX is a very good example. You can use the same peripherals, like a headset–if you want to play a game and hear everything through your headset, how do we make the headset work exactly the same and easily transferable when you play on the TV or the PC or a handheld device? That’s why I wanted to do the instant pair. Think of instant pair as a sophisticated Bluetooth. It’s a workaround for all these pairing challenges you might have, but the second part is latency. Bluetooth today is about 240 milliseconds. In the gaming world you need about 50 milliseconds. We need ultra-low latency. Because of that technology, now I can integrate the same solutions in PC and HyperX. When they come together, they just connect.
I can give you the same dongle and you can put it in your TV. After you’ve played a game, maybe your son or daughter says they want to play Fortnite together in the living room. You can shut down Fortnite on the PC, walk to the living room, and start playing on the TV. All you need to do with your headset is switch. One button. You have the same dongle in your TV. The audio just moves with you. We’re looking at ways we can create this kind of immersive gaming experience and make it seamlessly follow you.
GamesBeat: How do you tackle pain points for gamers now? One that bothers me a lot is I never have enough terabytes in my machine now. Games are getting so big. I have to delete the last game I added just to play the next one.
Tan: And games will get bigger. You know this well. The demand for higher-resolution graphics is there. When you have more sophisticated hardware to play games, the size of those games will get bigger. It’s not easy to solve the problem of storage, but storage capacity will grow bigger as well. It used to be that 512 gigs was a big deal. Now two terabytes is nothing for most gamers. The next step, if you ask me–how do we balance technology that lets us easily store content between cloud and local, so you can maximize your virtual space?
GamesBeat: I have a bunch of Call of Duty videos on my machine, but a lot of them have gone up to OneDrive. The cloud will bring them back to me when I want to watch them.
Tan: Right. Or we start finding ways to use things like GeForce NOW. Maybe on some level you’ll play them in the cloud. When you get to a more sophisticated level, you’ll bring some of that content back to your local drive.
GamesBeat: Are there other pain points you see that need solving?
Tan: A continuing pain point is how you get display technology to work so you can amplify what the graphics are showing. Just like with video a couple of years ago. The kind of content you see in a movie theater is different from what you see on your PC. How do we get to a point where display technology will be able to amplify the color space for exactly what a game wants to show?
GamesBeat: If you had to predict what the game machines are going to be like a year from now, what would you expect?
Tan: The power curve will continue to improve. We’ll see some more new form factors, I believe. They’re becoming more sophisticated. People want to play games everywhere. You may not want to carry a gaming laptop everywhere. We’re beginning to see trends going toward handheld devices and glasses. Right now that’s limited by weight and battery life, and by display technology in the case of glasses.
GamesBeat: There was once a prevalent attitude that all you need is one console. That’s disappearing. In the console wars you would only have an Xbox or a PlayStation. As you say, now you want your glasses or your PC. Maybe you want to move around more and play on a handheld device.
Tan: Consoles are tied to the living room. Games can be played on so many different platforms. PCs have sophisticated hardware capabilities that can play the same games. Why would you want to buy a console? Maybe only if one game you want is only available on that console. And it’s easy to play on console. You power on your console and it goes right to the last game you played. With PC, you have to go through a bootup process, the Windows desktop, the game profile you set up, blah blah blah. The experiences are getting closer, though. A new form factor will evolve, which is where we get to handhelds and glasses.
GamesBeat: Technologies like DLSS 4 come to the PC first as well. Consoles have to bring out new hardware.
Tan: PC power and performance will always evolve faster, just because of the installed base. We’re pushing that technology to go faster. The PC is designed for multitasking, multipurpose usage. You don’t just use the PC to play games. You use it to do a lot of things.
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