What if the company that sold your cheese also sold your PC gaming hardware? This is not the murmuring of some poor sod on a nineteen-hour Dota 2 binge who’s started thinking that the crumbs in his keyboard resemble a viable snack, but a bold new reality, one I recently found myself staring down during a trip to Asda. The supermarket chain – third biggest in the UK by turnover and purveyors of ill-fitting clothes and surprisingly good doughnuts alike – has added light-up gaming mice , keyboards , and headsets to its mountain of own-brand wares. Asda being what it is (Americans, if you’re unfamiliar, think Walmart with less gun violence), it’s all dirt cheap as well.
£17 for a full-size keyboard. £16 for an FPS mouse. Overwhelmed with curiosity, I ended up taking home a complete starter set (keeb, different mouse, headset, and mousemat) for £45 , or about a third of the price of the Logitech G515 Lightspeed TKL that I’d shortly kick off my desk.
Could this be a new frontier in affordable PC hardware, bringing tech to the masses in a way no specialist retailer ever could, or should supermarkets stick to cereal and meal deals? Surely the Asda Tech (real name) 4-in-1 Gaming Kit would have the answers. Early impressions were pleasantly decent. The mousemat was only slightly more spacious than a postage stamp and the lightning storm decoration on the mouse looked like an infant had just scratched off the coating with the edge of a coin, but the latter also sported mu.