The gadgets I’d buy

Image Credit: ASUS

Component costs are climbing, and every brand seemed determined to justify the numbers on the tag. Newzoo puts the global games market at $213.9 billion, up 6.1% year on year, so there’s no shortage of money chasing player attention. My picks below lean toward gear, because that’s where the arguments were most interesting, with a few games at the end.

1. Best of show: ASUS ROG XBOX Ally X20

ASUS brought its 20th anniversary handheld to Cologne, but the screen is what caught my attention. The ROG XBOX Ally X20 has a 7.4-inch 120 Hz OLED Nebula HDR display with up to 1,400 nits of peak brightness. The translucent body gets black and gold accents, while TMR joysticks, a transforming D-pad, and rubberized grips handle the controls.

At $1,299, the X20 costs $300 more than the standard model, and my first reaction was that ASUS had lost the plot. Then I compared it against what any OLED handheld costs.

For players who game away from a desk more often than at one, the X20 is the most complete Windows handheld from the show, provided you accept that the Ryzen Z2 AI Extreme silicon inside hasn’t moved.

2. Best esports monitor: ASUS ROG Swift OLED PG259QWS Ace

Competitive players have relied on 24.5-inch TN monitors for years. The ROG Swift OLED PG259QWS Ace takes a very different approach with a Tandem WOLED panel and a 720 Hz refresh rate. ASUS rates its gray-to-gray response time at 0.02ms, while HDR highlights can reach 1,700 nits. Dolby Vision is supported as well.

Resolution stays at Full HD, so the image won’t look as crisp as you might expect from a modern gaming monitor. Move it to another desk, and the built-in position sensor can show its previous tilt and height on screen. You can use that as a quick reference when setting up the monitor again.

A tripod socket sits on the monitor too, giving streamers a place to mount their gear. PGL has picked it as the official display for the 2026 Major.

3. Best living room upgrade: Samsung Odyssey OLED G7

Samsung’s 2027 Odyssey range had the widest spread of any monitor lineup in Cologne, and the 42-inch Odyssey OLED G7 is the one I’d want at home. Samsung calls it the first 42-inch 16:9 curved OLED gaming monitor, with 1000R curvature, 4K resolution, a 165Hz refresh rate, and a 0.03ms response time. Screen area grows roughly 72% over the 32-inch model it replaces.

A 32:9 monitor takes over a desk. The G7 makes more sense with some distance between you and the screen, where its huge curved panel can fill your view. Samsung’s 49-inch OLED G9 hits 360 Hz at Dual QHD, while the 27-inch Odyssey G6 claims 1,100 Hz in HD through Dual Mode. I’d still pick the G7 as the more interesting monitor because its size changes the whole setup.

eep an eye on

Alien: Isolation 2 is the announcement I cared about most. Moving from a claustrophobic space station to a planet surface is a big gamble, but I want to see how Creative Assembly handles it. METRO 2039 picks up Dmitry Glukhovsky’s series, while Rainbow Six Tactics takes the franchise in a very different direction with military strategy. Game of Thrones: War for Westeros gets another shot at turning the fantasy epic into a game worth playing.

CD Projekt Red is remastering The Witcher 3 in September and handing it free to existing owners, alongside a new region and story. LEGO Skylines from Iceflake looked like the cozy pick of the show, a city builder with no instructions and unlimited space. Farming Simulator 25 also passed five million copies sold, which tells you plenty about what people play versus what earns applause at a keynote.

What I’d buy and what I’d wait on

Component pricing hangs over every product above. NVIDIA has warned some of its largest customers that semiconductor prices could climb by as much as 15%, console prices have risen mid-cycle instead of falling, and German industry revenue dropped 3% to €4.2 billion in the first half of 2026 as hardware sales fell 8%.

My advice is to spend on the display and wait on everything else. Panels announced in Cologne will hold their value through the next two years of price pressure, while routers, drives, and handhelds all have successors already scheduled. The M42V2 at $39.99 is the one cheap purchase I’d make without a second thought.