The Mid-Range Ate the Flagship

JENSEN: Welcome back. Tonight is a product keynote. Two steering wheels. Same company. One is nine hundred ninety-nine dollars. The other is three forty-nine. I am going to tell you which one to buy and why the answer embarrasses the people who made the expensive one.

JENSEN: The context. Logitech invented the gaming wheel market with the G29. Two and a half newton-meters. Gear-driven. We all owned one. We all upgraded. For years, Logitech watched Fanatec and Moza eat the direct drive market while they sold gear-driven wheels that felt like stirring pudding. Then, two years ago, the G Pro. Eleven newton-meters. Direct drive. TRUEFORCE haptics. Nine hundred ninety-nine dollars for the wheel, three forty-nine for the pedals. One thousand three hundred forty-eight dollars total. A flagship. A statement. A wheel that made Gran Turismo 7 feel like a new game. I reviewed it. I praised it. I meant it.

JENSEN: And now Logitech shipped the RS50. Eight newton-meters. Direct drive. TRUEFORCE. Three hundred forty-nine dollars for the base. One hundred sixty for the pedals. Five hundred and nine dollars total. And here is where I need you to follow the math, because the math is the story.

JENSEN: The RS50 gives you seventy-three percent of the torque. The same TRUEFORCE haptic layer — engine rumble, tyre slip, kerb texture — the exact same technology that makes the G Pro special, at one-third the price. Same OLED screen on the base. Same proprietary quick release. Same ecosystem. Same G HUB software, which is still mid, but mid at three forty-nine hits different than mid at nine ninety-nine.

JENSEN: But here is the part that should keep Logitech's product team awake. The RS50 does something the G Pro does not. It works on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC from one box. The G Pro makes you choose. You buy the PlayStation SKU or the Xbox SKU. The RS50? One wheel. Three platforms. No hub swap. No second purchase. Logitech gave the cheap wheel a feature they withheld from the flagship. When the mid-range product out-features the halo product, your portfolio has a bug, not a feature.

JENSEN: The pedals. G Pro pedals: one hundred kilogram load cell, modular, swappable springs, Hall effect sensors. Very good. Are they Fanatec ClubSport good? No. But they are premium. RS Pedals: seventy-five kilogram load cell, Hall effect accelerator, simpler construction. One hundred sixty dollars. Are they ninety percent as good? Yes. Are they fifty percent of the price? Yes. You see the pattern.

JENSEN: The torque gap. Eleven newton-meters versus eight. Three newton-meters. I want you to feel that number. Three. If you are coming off a G29 at two point five, eight is a religious experience. Eleven is also a religious experience, but a more expensive one, and after ninety minutes your forearms hurt. Most people overestimate how much torque they need. I run my Simucube at twelve, dialed to twelve, and after an hour I dial it back. The RS50's eight newton-meters is enough to pin your arms, enough to feel every detail, enough to make you faster. The last three newton-meters are a luxury tax.

JENSEN: The ecosystem problem. Both wheels use the same proprietary quick release. That means you can only buy Logitech wheels. There is no Cube Controls. No Ascher. No third-party rims. On the G Pro at thirteen hundred dollars, I called this disappointing. On the RS50 at three forty-nine, I call it the same disappointing, but cheaper. The RS H-Shifter exists now — seven-speed, Hall effect, one fifty-nine. The handbrake exists. But if you want a different wheel rim, you are waiting for Logitech to make one. They have not made many.

JENSEN: The competition, because honest benchmarks are a lifestyle. On PC, the Moza R9 gives you nine newton-meters for three twenty-nine. More torque, less money. But PC only. No TRUEFORCE. No tri-platform. No OLED. If you are PC-only and you want maximum grunt per dollar, the R9 is the torque play. But the RS50 is the complete product. On console, there is no competition at this price. The Fanatec GT DD Pro costs more, delivers less out of the box, and its FullForce haptic equivalent barely works with any games. The Thrustmaster T598 is five newton-meters. Five. The RS50 has eight and TRUEFORCE. It is not close.

JENSEN: The verdict. The RS50 is the default recommendation for sim racing in twenty twenty-six. If you do not own a direct drive wheel, buy the RS50. If you are upgrading from a G29 or G923, buy the RS50. If you play on PlayStation, buy the RS50. If you play on Xbox, buy the RS50. If you play on PC and you want the simplest plug-and-play experience with TRUEFORCE and an OLED and a clean desk clamp in the box, buy the RS50.

JENSEN: The G Pro is for one person: the sim racer who already has an aluminum rig, who wants maximum torque, who wants the leather-wrapped three-hundred-millimeter wheel, and who has thirteen hundred dollars they were going to spend anyway. That person exists. That person is not most people. The G Pro is the enthusiast tier. The RS50 is the mass-market play. And when your mass-market product is this good, the enthusiast tier stops justifying itself.

JENSEN: Logitech cannibalized their own flagship. The mid-range ate the high-end. The RS50 delivers seventy-three percent of the torque, one hundred percent of the TRUEFORCE, a feature the flagship doesn't have, and a price that makes you question why you'd ever spend thirteen hundred dollars. That is not a product strategy. That is a Jensen keynote. The numbers are real. The torque gap is three. And the moat is not the wheel. It is the haptic layer they put in both of them.

JENSEN: Buy the RS50. Thank me later. See you next lap.