6 Best Mechanical Keyboard Brands (And 6 You Should Avoid At All Costs) – SlashGear

Glorious Gaming has gone through a rebrand since its early days as the meme-worth Glorious PC gaming race. The once-plucky upstart started out by delivering mechanical keyboards with fully-hot-swap sockets for half the price of the big-name brands, and they still sell those today in the GMMK 1, which comes in full-size, TKL, and 60% sizes for the same $109.95 price. The next move was to enter the ultralight mouse market, following the success of another up-and-coming startup, Finalmouse. The Glorious Model O, O-, Model D, and D- came in wired and wireless versions, bringing low-cost, low-weight, and high-quality gaming mice to the masses.

The first batches of Model O mice had a packaging issue that damaged the cord on some units. Glorious decided to ship every affected user a new custom-sleeved cable to fix the problem and sold cables in various colors. Then came the Holy Panda incident. Holy Pandas are a frankenswitch created from Halo True stems and Invyr Panda housings. Another vendor, Drop, owns the Halo True stem tooling. Glorious found the tooling for the housings and bought them. With two vendors holding half of the whole, the question became who owns the Holy Panda name. Glorious tried to trademark the name, despite only having the rights to part of the product. The community erupted, resulting in Glorious changing its switch name and withdrawing the trademark application. Glorious now sells a high-end keyboard, the $349.99 GMMK Pro and the $129.99 GMMK Numpad, a far cry from its roots as an affordable alternative.