At this year’s GDC Festival of Gaming, Razer showed up ready to play with a new suite of AI-powered devices and services.
Razer’s presence at GDC 2026 was all about artificial intelligence, with the company holding press briefings to showcase a range of future-facing tools. GamesBeat attended a one-on-one briefing with Razer vice president of software Quyen Quach and had a chance to experience a hands-on demo of some of the company’s new products.
The majority of the briefing was occupied by a demo of Razer AVA, the desktop companion product. Razer first announced Project AVA as a virtual gameplay companion last year, with the company showing off a 5.5-inch-tall holographic desktop companion using AVA at CES 2026 earlier this year.
At GDC, Razer announced a new agentic system for AVA, turning the desktop companion into an AI agent that is able to perform multi-step tasks and operate independently of humans. Quach showcased the AI companion’s ability to add expenses to a spreadsheet and independently coordinate and schedule meetings with other AI companions. In the future, Razer is planning to integrate more software tools and potentially even smart home features into the device, making it a more embodied competitor to devices like Amazon’s Alexa.
“When you can just ask a personality or a companion that’s in your life to start to control everything for you, it’s going to be easier for you to control it as well,” Quach said during the briefing. “You can just ask it questions, and it can ask you questions back if it doesn’t understand.”
Quach and other Razer representatives at the briefing acknowledged that Razer was “creating the category” for a new type of product with its AVA companion, but expressed confidence that gamers would be willing to give the product a try. So far, AVA allows users to toggle between two anime-styled avatars — a female companion named Kira and a male avatar named Zane — but Quach said that Razer was actively meeting with developers at GDC to discuss incorporating their characters and IP as additional avatars in the AI companion product.
“At this point, we’re going to keep it limited to our models and our characters, because they do have different personalities and voices and things like that,” Quach said. “And we just want to be mindful of guardrails and how they are represented.”
Razer representatives declined to share a planned selling price for Razer AVA, but said that interested customers can reserve their hologram device for a $20 deposit.
In addition to the AI companion, Razer’s briefing showcased other AI-powered tools including an enhanced quality assurance companion and a new runtime intended to streamline the integration of Razer’s sensory gameplay products like haptics and RGB lighting. The AI-enhanced QA tools expand on the QA Companion product Razer announced last year, with Razer rolling out an agentic AI QA tester and a bug detector that is able to find glitches using video clips of gameplay.
In addition to meeting developers about the AVA avatar opportunity at GDC 2026, Razer representatives were also at the event to meet with developers and sell them on these new QA tools, with the primary selling point that the company has significantly reduced the friction to integrate them into developers’ workflow over the past year.
“We have a partner room where we actually talk to all the game developers, and they are really excited about the fact that there are integration-free features now that they can really test out, and it’s all available online,” said Razer software product marketing manager Christabel Liew during the briefing. “So, they can just sign up on our site, and we are really looking forward to partnering with more studios to actually showcase this together.”