Robin Piispanen, the new head of Logitech's gaming division as of May 4, 2026, told The Verge that Logitech is not currently building a gaming handheld and is not sure it ever should try again.

Piispanen joined Logitech in 2008. His appointment was announced via the company's official newsroom in April 2026 (Logitech Newsroom).

The device in question is the G Cloud, a handheld gadget co-developed with Tencent that launched in 2022 at $350. It had a 7-inch touchscreen, customizable buttons, and a battery lasting over 12 hours. The idea was to play video games that actually run on powerful computers far away and stream the picture to the handheld over the internet — a setup called cloud gaming. The device expanded to nine European countries in May 2023.

By Piispanen's own assessment, the device's real-world usage tells a stark story: about 80 percent of buyers "bought it, tried it, and then it ended up in a drawer."

"We tried something that we really believed in, and it didn't really materialize into the use case people wanted," Piispanen said. He attributed the outcome partly to the broader environment, noting that cloud gaming "really stagnated." He also pointed to cost realities flagged by the industry's largest platform holder: "Microsoft clearly said cloud is expensive, cloud gaming is expensive to run."

The decision to step back from handhelds is about business economics as much as the G Cloud's specific performance. A handheld gaming business "only works when you get to a really big scale, and most of the handheld companies also own the content," Piispanen said. He cited Asus as a cautionary parallel, noting that companies that only make hardware "operate on slim margins and they don't own anything." Logitech's strengths, in his framing, are design and input — the keyboards, mice, and controllers it is known for. The company would likely need to partner with someone else for the rest if it ever built another standalone device.

On the question of a successor specifically: "Right now, in this moment in time, there's bigger things for us to focus on than doing a second G Cloud." Piispanen said he is not sure when or if Logitech should try another handheld after the G Cloud.

The broader context here is that cloud gaming has faced the same core problem since its earliest days: the experience depends on computer infrastructure that is still too expensive and inconsistent to support a product built entirely around it. Think of it like building a fancy radio for a station that keeps going off the air. When a product's usefulness depends on things like server costs, internet speed, and the delay between pressing a button and seeing the result — all of which vary by where you live — that product inherits all of those weaknesses. The G Cloud was a well-built piece of hardware attached to a service the industry could not yet make work reliably at scale.

Piispanen's openness about the drawer rate is striking on its own. An 80 percent abandonment figure, shared publicly by the division's new leader, is a level of honesty that most hardware executives would avoid. It reframes the G Cloud not as a modest commercial success that fell short of expectations, but as a device whose main purpose never caught on for the large majority of people who bought it. The European expansion in mid-2023 occurred after the initial U.S. launch but evidently did not change the underlying usage pattern Piispanen now describes.

The more lasting point Piispanen makes is about content ownership. Companies that both make the device and control the games on it — like Nintendo, Sony, and Valve — earn profit from both the hardware and the software. A company like Logitech, which primarily makes accessories, starts with only the hardware side when it enters the standalone device market. The G Cloud's reliance on other companies' streaming services meant even the software experience was not fully under Logitech's control.

The G Cloud did find an unexpected second life: it worked with Shadow, a service that gives you a full Windows PC in the cloud, extending the device beyond gaming into remote desktop and productivity use. But that is a side benefit, not the cloud-gaming future the device was built to serve.

For Logitech G, the immediate takeaway is that the division will focus on the products where its design and input expertise translate directly into competitive advantage: mice, keyboards, headsets, and controllers. The handheld question is parked, not closed. But the conditions Piispanen has set for revisiting it — owning content or finding a major partner — are demanding enough that a second G Cloud does not appear to be a near-term priority.