Mad Catz Emerges From Bankruptcy

LAS VEGAS, NV -- Mad Catz, a company known for weird but fun (and often expensive) gaming peripherals, is back from bankruptcy. (Insert nine lives pun here.)

After selling off assets to raise cash in 2016--it sold the Saitek brand to Logitech for $13 million--the company officially filed for bankruptcy in March 2017. PricewaterhouseCoopers took over as trustee of the Mad Catz Interactive estate and presumably oversaw the further liquidation of assets and subsidiaries.

The Return

Pre-CES PR clues led us to suspect that the brand was about to re-emerge, and just ahead of the massive tradeshow next week, both UberStrategist and Little Big PR announced this morning that Mad Catz is back. The releases proudly stated that the company is back “under new management, with new ideas, new attitude,” and of course a range of new products.

“We couldn’t be more excited than to begin 2018 by announcing the return of Mad Catz to the global gaming arena. Mad Catz has been a permanent fixture in gaming for almost three decades and we firmly believe it’s best days lie ahead,” said Selena Chang, Director of Sales and Operations for Mad Catz Global Limited in a release.

New Gear

The company’s return is of course heralded by a new line of gear. We don’t have much detail yet, but we do know that there’s a handful of mice, a mechanical keyboard, and a couple of headsets.

A short teaser video offers some visual clues about the new peripherals:

Much of the company’s product nomenclature remains. There’s the Rat 8+ mouse (or is that a 6?), which predictably has bells and whistles like extra roller wheels and what appears to be a height-adjustable palm rest. It boasts a sharp black matte, shiny black, and red color scheme.

The Rat Air has an exoskeleton-like construction and promises full adjustability and wired or wireless connections. There’s a wireless power system involved--a growing trend, it seems, in the mouse world.

There’s next to no information about the new keyboard, the Strike 4, other than the facts that it’s fully mechanical and has RGB lighting as well as an aluminum frame. From the brief glimpses you get in the teaser video, you can see that it’s a rather restrained design; it’s black on black with white legends, with only a funky graphic on the front bezel for sizzle. A product shot from the press kit, though, reveals that these are “RGB” switches of some kind, meaning that the switch housing are clear to let the light explode all over the surface of the keyboard. You can also see that it’s a full-size form factor.

There’s also a pair of “Freq” headsets. One is a more standard over-the-ear cup design (40mm neodymium drivers and a metal plated frame), and the other is a stripped-down, lightweight earpiece and mic design. Both offer a staid all-black design, although the larger Freq 4 has an RGB secret:

Although it wasn’t in the teaser video, there are also multiple a “Glide” gaming surfaces; one of the them, at least, appears to contain the wireless power that the Rat Air mouse uses.

We’ll certainly learn more about Mad Catz’ new peripherals--and potentially more about the bankruptcy adventures--at CES 2018 next week.

  • MusenMouse
    Wow Mad Catz back from the dead. I always enjoy rooting for the underdog and I still have fond memories of unusual, somewhat sketchy, but useful Mad Catz products like their 32x Gamecube memory card.
    Reply
  • Giroro
    Mad Catz had been putting out some good console accessories recently, but the name of the brand is the absolute last thing they should be trying to save.
    A very large portion of their audience will always remember Mad Catz as the cheap off-brand garbage that wasn't very comfortable to use and broke almost immediately.

    I would -much- rather see their (good) fighting sticks and similar revived under a new brand name, instead of "All new" products under the tainted name. Did the quality of the new designs drop back down again? I'll probably never find out, because there's already hundreds of great mice/keyboards/headsets being sold by more reputable brands.
    Reply
  • Eximo
    I think I bought a bluetooth madcatz controller for my brother's tegra 3 phone. Included a grip to hold the phone kind of like an Nvidia Shield and a battery to keep the phone alive longer while gaming. I thought that was a pretty neat product.

    In my youth we always managed to track down used OEM controllers and such at re-use places, so I don't think we ever ended up with any MadCatz console accessories.
    Reply
  • bloodroses
    20558258 said:
    Mad Catz had been putting out some good console accessories recently, but the name of the brand is the absolute last thing they should be trying to save.
    A very large portion of their audience will always remember Mad Catz as the cheap off-brand garbage that wasn't very comfortable to use and broke almost immediately.

    I would -much- rather see their (good) fighting sticks and similar revived under a new brand name, instead of "All new" products under the tainted name. Did the quality of the new designs drop back down again? I'll probably never find out, because there's already hundreds of great mice/keyboards/headsets being sold by more reputable brands.

    I completely agree. The only Mad Catz item I'd consider was their fighting stick lines; but there was always equal competition such as Hori and Mayflash. As for their other accessories, every one of them were worse than competitive lines:

    Keyboards: DAS, Ducky, Topre, etc
    Mice: Logitech, Steelseries, etc
    Headphones: Corsair, Sennheiser, etc

    It is more than just their bad past reputation (PS2, GC era and earlier) that put Mad Catz into bankruptcy; they just weren't able to compete well enough.
    Recently, they were going for strictly gaming brand reputation; but Razer is in the way. Overpriced garbage imo, but each their own and they're still better than Mad Catz outside arcade sticks.

    As with Saitek, the only item I ever owned was their Eclipse II keyboard. The 'g' and 'h' keys starting becoming hard to respond after about 6 months; so the quality wasn't that good there either.
    Reply
  • Jay_29
    Honestly, the products in the video don’t seem interesting or innovative to me at all. I’ve come across some of their products and I can’t see myself using them. The products I did find impressive was the flight and fight sticks, but they sold Saitek off. The mice and keyboard with all the gloss and bleeding LED stems as suggested by the vid cheapens everything imo. I honestly don’t think they can compete with the likes of Logitech and should stick to creating console peripherals and accessories.
    Reply
  • mihen
    I really liked Saitek before they were bought by Mad Catz. The first 2 keyboards I liked where the Saitek Eclipse, and Eclipse II. Everything I bought from Mad Catz broke. They were either junk on arrival or broke a few months later. Dealing with their returns process was easy except they just shipped you other broken stuff. Eventually I just gave up trying to get a working part from them and shipped them all their stuff back telling them to keep it.
    I don't think I could ever see myself buying something from them.
    Reply