The Tariff Buzzsaw Is Coming For Hardcore Gamers

Odd Lots

Bloomberg

News, Investing, Business, News Commentary, Business News

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 7 May 2025

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Every industry is going to be affected by the trade war in different ways. In many cases, we don't know how it's going to play out. Other industries are seeing an immediate impact. Companies that specialize in computer gaming are highly reliant on inputs from China and other East Asian countries. These companies assemble customized gaming rigs and other peripherals (cameras, chairs, controllers, speakers etc.). On this episode, we're joined by Stephen Burke, the founder of Gamers Nexus, a publication and YouTube channel that primarily exists to review products in this space. When the tariffs were announced in early April, he immediately set out to film a documentary titled The Death of Affordable Computing. In that 3-hour video, he talked to numerous players in the space on their profit margins, and how they will be hurt by the changing trade policy. We speak to Steve about this industry, and what he learned about what tariffs will do to both their profitability, or even their viability as ongoing businesses.

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1:14.8	Hello and welcome to another episode of the Oddlot podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthall.
1:31.0	And I'm Tracy Alawett. Tracy, this has come up on the podcast, but one of the things with the tariffs
1:36.8	is I still think for the most part people are talking about them from like a fiscal standpoint,
1:43.1	which is, okay, prices are going to go up. What does that do
1:46.0	to inflation? What does that do to sales? What does that do to employment? And less about the
	...

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