A $500 Chair For My Sweaty Gamer Ass: The Motherboard Review

For months, my office chairs vexed me. I work from home and play video games on the PC so I’m sitting in front of my computer a lot. Twice I attempted to invest in “nice” office chairs that cost north of $100 and both times I had destroyed the chairs in less than six months.

I’m not a heavy man, and I’m not doing anything untoward in the office chairs that would cause them undue stress. It’s just that most of these chairs are designed to be comfortable when you first sit in them and then quickly degrade. Worse, when I played games with friends, the squeaking and squealing of my dying office chairs was a source of anger as the noise inevitably floated down the microphone and into my buddy’s ears. I was told to upgrade or stop using voice chat.

I wanted comfort. I wanted luxury. I wanted a chair that would hold my sweaty gamer ass for upwards of 12 hours at a time and not blink. God help me, I needed a pro-gamer chair.

My other, lesser, office chairs seemed good on paper. One was a leather bound seat designed for maximum comfort, now it squeaks and screams everytime it moves and causes me back pain after an hour. The other was a slick office chair with alleged ergonomic bends and folds designed to keep an office drone from collapsing in his seat. My cats descended upon the chair and tore it apart. After six months of use, it felt like sitting on plywood.

The healthy thing to do would be to buy a treadmill desk. But fuck that. I’m a gamer and I’m not going to walk forward while crushing Alliance in World of Warcraft. I refuse to stand while using my dual monitors to explore No Man’s Sky and watching a documentary at the same time. I deserve to sit and I deserve to sit in maximum luxury.

Professional streamers and pro-gamers know what’s up. These brave men and women sit for hours a day in front of computer screens, streaming their every movement to Twitch for our amusement. That kind of job demands the kind of chair I was looking for. There are many brands—DXRacer, Maxnomic, OPseat—but all are essentially the same. Gamer chairs are more like car seats than office chairs. They’re sturdier, with swooped wings on either side that conform around the buttocks. It’s a racing-style bucket seat for your office.

After a day of research, I found the slick monster I wanted—a Maxnomic Ergoceptor Pro. I shelled out $500, waited a few days, and assembled the chair on the floor of my office.

It’s easily the best $500 I’ve spent in a long time. The unyielding leather seats seem as if they’d be uncomfortable at first, but once the body adjusts, you’ll never want anything else. It spins, tilts, and lays all the way back. The armrests move up, down, and side to side. A comfortable pillow is nestled into my lumbar, another at the base of my neck, cradling my delicate galaxy gamer brain.

I even paid extra to have the company embroider my gamer tag into the top of the chair. I have evolved. I no longer have time for shitty also-ran office chairs. The future is for gamers and all gamers must have decadent thrones to support their body as they wander through digital landscapes for hours on end.

My body may atrophy, but thanks to my $500 gamer chair, I no longer feel it.