Five Things I Always Tell People Before They Buy Their First Gaming...

I've been testing gaming chairs for eight years, and here's what I always tell people looking to buy one.

Stable, comfy, and earns you serious gamer cred. That's the dream for any gaming chair purchase. I can't promise you'll necessarily earn the respect of your peers for sitting on a gilded racing-style seat to play The Finals or Stardew Valley, but I can at least help you pick a comfy and stable throne using my years of experience.

I've been testing gaming chairs for over eight years. Everything from noted gaming brands such as Secretlab and Noblechairs, to office maestros such as Herman Miller. In that time, gaming chairs have gone from the butt of the joke to the de facto furniture for people to play PC games on. There's a good reason for that. The quality of gaming chairs has, generally, increased. Though not every manufacturer got the memo. There's still a lot of junk out there.

If you simply want to know which gaming chair is no.1 right now, I keep a carefully curated list of the best gaming chairs. However, for this article I'm going to run down what I look out for in a gaming chair when judging its worthiness, and the advice I wish I'd had before I ever started sitting my butt on these things professionally.

So, those five things I need to tell you before you buy your first gaming chair:

I've been plonking myself on gaming chairs for over eight years now. Professionally, I might add. That means I'm well versed in what makes a gaming chair good and what makes a gaming chair very, very bad.

We're headed into a major deals event with Black Friday on November 28, 2025. That means we will see a heap of deals on gaming chairs around that time. In fact, we're already on the lookout for the best early Black Friday gaming chair deals right now. And yes, that's a shameless plug. My point is not to devalue these deals as anything but solid—we only recommend genuinely good products—but make sure you know what not to buy.

If a gaming chair seems massively cheaper than ones we recommend, it's probably for good reason.

Over the years, I've had the misfortune of sitting in a few extremely cheap gaming chairs. From the images shown online, they look as much a gaming chair as any other. Yet my first impressions are usually the same:

The backrests on the cheapest are usually thin, hard and not well padded. The armrests are usually non-adjustable, which means you won't ever be able to get yourself into the most comfortable position for your desk setup. The m

Source: PC Gamer