The history of RGB and how Govee is leading the charge in 2023

This post is a sponsored article in partnership with Govee.

It’s a bit tricky to imagine the gaming landscape without RGB lighting. It’s so ubiquitous at this point that it makes you wonder where it came from and how pretty lights have become such a selling point for even the most mundane products.

So, dear reader, today we’re going to give you a history lesson exploring the origins of this weirdly popular feature and explain why Govee is currently positioned on the bleeding edge of RGB lighting technology.

When did RGB lighting start?

As long as PC-building enthusiasts have been around, they’ve implemented creative lighting solutions into gaming PCs. There was a strong trend for a while in the 90s/2000s where UV lights were all the rage, with many PC components treated or coloured to glow under a UV light.

This all looked pretty spectacular in a 2000s sort of way, however, UV lighting has a degrading effect on certain materials, meaning that stuff like cables and connectors would become brittle over time. Clearly, UV lighting was not long for this world, so when it was supplanted by LED strips, nobody was surprised (though, we do miss that characteristic radioactive glow).

Of course, with LED strips, it was a relatively trivial matter to get LEDs in different colours; however, this was not true RGB. Interestingly enough, it was gaming peripherals that really kicked off the trend.

RGB lighting truly began in 2014 at CES, when both Razer and Corsair showed off RGB keyboards. Keyboards, incidentally, made sense as the first mainstream implementation of RGB as backlighting the keys on a keyboard is actually useful for darker environments.

Obviously, being able to backlight a keyboard with all 16.4 million colours of the RGB spectrum is not necessary, but since when has high-performance PC gaming been anything to do with necessity?

With the release of these keyboards, it was only a matter of time before PC gamers the world over began to realise that their PCs and gaming setups were not nearly as excitingly vivid as their keyboards.

This resulted in an unsurprising and inexorable march on PC hardware, with fans, cases, GPUs, and CPU coolers all getting an illuminative RGB treatment. Likewise, the peripherals side of things also got a makeover, with even the most basic of products getting a literal glow-up. This means that mouse pads, headphone stands, and even mouse bungees began to shine in all 16.4 million colors of the glorious RGB spectrum.

Govee’s place at the forefront of gaming lighting

At this point, you might be wondering when Govee got involved in the RGB lighting space race that continues to this day. Well, let’s take a moment to go over the timeline of the company currently leading the RGB industry.

Govee was founded in 2017 and was rapidly named on the list of ‘Top 5 Fastest Growing Electronics Brands in North America’ by SimilarWeb. From this, they grew exponentially, experiencing a 100% increase in year-over-year sales on Govee.com.

They launched the Govee Home app and started selling products in the US in 2018. In 2020 they officially partnered with the premier color space company Pantone, and the brand’s annual sales exceeded $200m, cementing Govee’s position as a leader in the RGB home smart lighting market. This was reinforced when Govee became a monthly best seller at Walmart, morphing Govee into a genuine household name for consumers.

2022 was a bumper year for Govee, as the Govee Home app exceeded 11m users, and they kicked off official collaborations with gaming peripheral brand Razer and the smash hit Netflix Original Stranger Things.

Unfortunately, we don’t have any secret info on where Govee is heading as a company, but given its meteoric rise as a brand and continuously climbing sales numbers, we’re sure that there’s an exciting time ahead.

So, there’s a brief history of Govee, but what is the brand up to right now? The answer, of course, is innovating, and its latest innovative product is the Govee AI Gaming Sync Box Kit.

Govee AI Gaming Sync Box Kit

There are a few reasons why the Govee AIGaming Sync Box Kit should be the next purchase for your gaming setup, whether you’re a PC or console gamer.

Where most RGB gaming lights allow you to choose from a few preset effects, and some of the fancier ones take the average colour on screen and replicate that with lighting, the Govee Ai Gaming Sync Box Kit gives you much, much more.

Of course, it can do those things too, but where it truly shines is with its CogniGlow™ algorithm. The proprietary AI algorithm literally learns from the video signal via HDMI to not only replicate what’s on screen, but create custom dynamic lighting effects simultaneously.

For example, the lights could flash red and white when you need to heal, not because the game is flashing, but because the algorithm knows when you’re low on health.
It does this by analysing over 100,000 in-game events in real-time, taking into account the colours, on-screen text, and other aspects of the signal. The algorithm then uses this to recognise and convert the information into real-time lighting effects.

For those of you who like to use a console and PC, the AI Gaming Sync Box Kit comes with 3x HDMI inputs. It supports dynamic switching, meaning that you can run your console, PC, and streaming stick through the box, and they can all help create a spectacular light show regardless of what content you’re consuming.

Govee’s app also allows you to sync this up with its entire smart-lighting ecosystem, creating a fully immersive experience. The products also effortlessly connect to Amazon Echo and Google Home, adding an extra level of convenience for smart-home integration.

So, if you want to take part in the next evolution of RGB lighting, check out the Govee Ai Gaming Sync Box Kit, and enter a new level of immersion the next time you sit down to start up a game. Check out the Govee AI Gaming Sync Box Kit ($/￡299.99) here or on Amazon here with a limited-time 15% discount with code GoveeAIBox by April 22nd!