Inside Snap Tap, the new hotness keyboard feature outlawed by Valve
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
The gaming keyboard market is currently tripping over itself, trying to equip everything with the technology most commonly known as Snap Tap: a feature that promises hyperfast inputs of two alternating keypresses, making you an unkillable side-strafing blur in your FPS of choice. Introduced on Razer’s Huntsman V3 Pro series and quickly followed by Wooting’s (functionally distinct but effectively identical) Rappy Snappy, Snap Tap is now wearing multiple names as it takes over the world of RGB peripherals, from SteelSeries’ Rapid Tap to Corsair’s FlashTap and Keychron’s… Last Keystroke Prioritisation. Which doesn’t sound as sexy, but still.
However, Snap Tap is also drawing a level of ire that exceeds the usual baseline scepticism of hardware marketing. Because it enables a form of input automation – where you can quickly move in two directions by rapidly tapping one key, while holding down another – it’s considered by some as tantamount to cheating, allowing players to cross the line that divides unfair play from the accepted comforts that come with simply using a responsive Hall Effect keyboard or high-refresh-rate monitor. It’s even become a bannable offence in certain games, most notably in Counter-Strike 2.
Neither side is backing down; in an astonishingly worded tweet, Wooting went as far as to concede Snap Tap “should be considered cheating. But if it’s allowed, you need it.” But do you?
