Garmin’s making an esports watch

Some people may not consider competitive esports to be a real sport because of the lack of physicality involved, but if you watch the pros play and see how they combine incredible reflexes and quick thinking massive amounts of pressure and stress, it certainly feels like strenuous activity.

One of the biggest smartwatch manufacturers that focuses on the sports and activity market is now targeting the esports market with a new watch aimed at gamers called the Garmin Instinct Esport edition. While still boasting many of the same features as its other fitness devices, such as tracking your regular fitness pursuits like, walking, running, cycling and swimming, it also boasts some new features aimed at bringing the best out of the esports athlete.

The purpose of the watch and its many features is that it’s designed to help gamers understand their stress and energy levels to possibly make better gaming decisions while encouraging improved fitness to help them improve their performance over time.

The watch makes use of a new PC streaming tool called “STR3AMUP!” that allows gamers to transmit information like heart rate and stress levels to game streaming services, allowing both gamers and fans to have further access to info to better understand what they are going through.

Through syncing the watch with Garmin’s own connect app, it will also allow gamers to better analyse their gaming sessions online in a dedicated esports page, where it tracks a player’ss vital functions, which will last for up to 80 hours. So, that you can see exactly just how bad your stress levels were while you are running around with low health trying to win that last round of Fortnite or Apex Legends.

Essentially, the watch only offers minor changes to the traditional Instinct model though no doubt some pro gamers would definitely welcome the added functionality to their gaming sessions. Garmin continues to build on these features from here and can include integration and notifications with more gaming systems and even the games themselves.  

The new watch does not have local pricing as yet, though if its priced in-line with other Instinct models, we can expect it to retail for between R4500 – R5000.

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Last Updated: November 6, 2020