One of the more infuriating cycles of the modern age is discovering a product or brand that fills a need you have, adopting it into your life, and then watching it get destroyed once the parent company gets bought or sold off. The capitalism is bad, we know it, and that's not necessarily what this post is about.
For better or worse, I've had a components manufactured by Corsair in my computer for 15 or so years. I still feel their power supplies are some of the best on the market, and to date I've only had one die on me. Over the years this has slowly expanded to using corsair ram, a corsair case, corsair keyboards, mice and headphones, and finally corsair RGB lighting systems, fans and water coolers.
These days it can make sense to try and stick with one brand of component manufacturer for building PCs, especially if you care about RGB. I've written before about corsair's icue software and it's failings compared to software that tries to work with with all manufacturer's components. For the most part iCue fails in providing a robust, customizable lighting system, but excels in being a one stop shop to manage your peripherals, such as keybinds and fan curves.
In 2017-2019 Corsair went on a buying spree and acquired a number of other companies, Elgato being one of the larger and more impressive purchases. Elgato is the premiere streamer accessory manufacturer, and likely made corsair a stupid amount of money in the 2020-2022 period.
Elgato, while making capture gear and key lights, also makes the Stream Deck, which has broken out of it's "Stream controller" product category and expanded into a productivity juggernaut. As with most computer accessories, the Stream Deck is mostly there as a shortcut box, but it's much more powerful than that offering macro features, application specific layouts, and an API that allows programmers to make custom functions for applications. I use mine to effortlessly switch between windows screen layouts (dual monitors, TV only, rotated monitor for tate mode etc), switch audio playback devices, and expose a ton of shortcuts for retroarch while its running. I'm only using 10% of its power.
The stream deck control software is intuitive to understand, flexible, and can be expanded. It also covers a lot of functionality that iCue has (albeit for your keyboard and mice only). iCue however is unintuitive, not flexible and has zero expansion. When one software company with a bad product buys another company that has a similar but better software product, you expect the buyer to throw away the better software the purchased company made and instead try (and usually fail) to integrate it with their worse product.
Thankfully, for now, Corsair has largely avoided trying to merge iCue with the Stream Deck control software. This has caused a bit of awkwardness in some of their brand synergy attempts. For instance, like all gamer keyboard manufacturers, corsair has attempted to add extra keys wherever they can fit them on the keyboard to allow Gamers to make custom keybinds with them. They call them G-Keys, and while they can be programmed in iCue, Corsair wanted to provide stream deck functionality to streamers who don't want or can't afford a stream deck. So now certain corsair keyboards with G-Keys can be programmed in the Elgato stream deck software as well. This greatly expands the capabilities of the keys, but makes it awkward and forces you to now run two programs in the background.
To quote Hatsune Miku, "I told you that story so I can tell you this one"
I've been in the market for a new controller for pc for a bit. Sadly the 8bitdo pro 2 wireless controller, while initially amazing, started having weird issues for me (dropped inputs over bluetooth being the most annoying, but also the rubber on the thumbstick started to fall off). I have an xbox elite controller, but over the years I have come to not like the xbox layout of thumbstick being on the top left, and the dpad just feeling like garbage. I wanted a playstation layout, but I didn't want to use a PS5 controller because its battery life is atrocious and it still has "Sony product on PC" issues.
Initially I was just going to buy a new 8bitdo pro 2 controller, but best buy was sold out, so I started looking into what else is out there. I decided to check out what SCUF was offering, and found that they had just released the Envision Pro, a "Pro" controller designed for pc. This post is not a review of that controller, but day 3 thoughts are "It plays Super Mario World real good"
This is where I found out SCUF got bought by Corsair, as the page advertising the controller proudly points out its compatibility with iCue. The controller also features 5 of corsair's G-Keys for additional customization. Because of my experience with the g-keys on my corsair keyboards, I thought that this would work with the Stream deck control software as well, which would allow control of OBS shortcuts among other things. Sadly it does not.
Now the obvious solution would be to just bind the function in the program I want to a complex set of key presses and then to bind the g-key to that, but I'm genuinely running out of complex key combos that are easy to remember and not some archaic windows shortcut (who is also genuinely running out of shortcuts combinations)
For some reason, despite using the branded G-Keys name, they are not programable by the Stream Deck, so I am stuck using iCue to manage them. It's at this point I started wondering what is going on with Corsair and its brands and why they failed an obvious synergy opportunity.
Business desperately want you to believe the fiction that when one company purchases another, they become one. Sadly this is hardly ever the case, especially in software. Instead silo's are created until one product is gutted in favor of the other. Promised synergy and integration never materializes, and often purchased companies have their product just disappear off the market. I'm not sure why Corsair had SCUF make a controller that integrated with iCue but not the ever more popular Stream Deck. One imagines if such demands exist Corsair and Elgato will do the smart thing and offer it in a software update, but my experience with Corsair is that a product never receives new functionality through software.
There are other annoying quibbles I have with this controller that I'll put in a separate post once I have more time with it. For now, what feels like what would be an obvious win is sadly missing, and it's just another example of the promises of capital failing to materialize in the real world.