GALLERIA Wins Gaming PC Award for Fifth Consecutive Year, Drops 'Gaming PC' Label
GALLERIA's deliberate rebranding from 'gaming PC' to 'high-performance PC' reflects a strategic shift to capture the creator market beyond gamers, even as component price hikes pressure the entire PC industry.
Reporting from 2 sources: Inside, Game Spark.
Thirdwave's high-performance PC brand GALLERIA has won the Overall Satisfaction Award in the Desktop PC Category at the Gaming PC Award 2025-2026, conducted by IID, marking its fifth consecutive win. In an interview with Game Spark and Inside, Director and Senior Executive Officer Yusuke Nishimura discussed the brand's strategy and market challenges. Since around last year, GALLERIA has stopped calling itself a "gaming PC" and now positions itself as a "high-performance PC" to appeal to creators in illustration, music production, and video editing. The brand held an illustration contest with pixiv to reach new audiences. Nishimura noted that memory and storage prices rose 1.3 to 1.5 times from late 2025, driving up PC costs. To counter this, GALLERIA ran a Golden Week campaign offering a memory upgrade for 555 yen. On collaborations, Nishimura said models for remaining VSPO! members will release from mid-June, completing the full set. The brand is also approaching participants in STGR (Street Graffiti Roleplay) and recently collaborated with Honkai: Star Rail. A mini compact type PC is planned for release within the year.
Nishimura said the brand's core approach has not changed since GALLERIA launched in 2004: "create and continue to create products that delight our target customers." He credited the five-year award streak partly to a growing number of partner companies and the consistent adoption of the latest CPUs and GPUs from Intel, AMD, and Nvidia.
The main customer demographic remains people in their late 20s to early 30s, with new buyers joining while existing users stay. Nishimura said the brand has not seen a dramatic age shift.
On pricing strategy, Nishimura said the 555 yen memory upgrade during Golden Week was designed to be "impactful and easy to understand." He said memory was the component that had risen most in price, and a simple price cut on the whole PC "didn't seem interesting." He added that he "got scolded a bit from above" for the aggressive pricing.
Nishimura said the component price outlook remains unclear. "There is still a slight upward trend in prices, and procurement is unstable," he said. He expects the situation to continue at least until summer.
On the VSPO! collaboration, Nishimura said the remaining member models will ship from mid-June, completing the full set. For the Nijisanji collaboration, models for Lauren Iroas and Ibrahim were recently announced. The Honkai: Star Rail collaboration was discussed for about a year before launch and has received positive feedback on its design.
Nishimura said the company has announced a policy to invest 5 billion yen over three years in AI business. It is hiring 70 people with high AI skills, mainly graduates from Indian engineering universities, and plans to hold an "AI Festival." However, he noted that many creative-field customers have negative impressions of generative AI due to copyright issues, and the brand is being careful about how heavily it promotes AI in marketing.
On product development, Nishimura said the two non-negotiable points are "delivering products that allow customers to do what they want" and "how to strike a balance with current market prices." He gave an example of streamers requesting "64GB of memory and two 2TB SSDs" and said building that spec as-is would make the product too expensive to sell.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 2 cited sources below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.