Is the "gaming" label in PC peripherals just a marketing gimmick?

For quite a while now, probably 15 to 20 years, a lot of PC peripherals have been marketed with the label "gaming". Heck, even things like chairs have been marked with that label.

But does that label actually mean anything, does it make any actual difference, or is it just a meaningless marketing gimmick?

With some peripherals it may well be completely meaningless, and the device is just completely normal, no different from any non-"gaming" versions from that same manufacturers. 

With some peripherals, such as mice, SSDs, GPUs and RAM, the "gaming" might just be slapped onto higher-end products, such as high-DPI mice and faster SSDs, GPUs and RAM. So it's essentially a marketing gimmick in that it's replacing some technical term (like "high-DPI") with a term that sells better (ie. "gaming"). So, whether that label, "gaming", is actually meaningful is a bit of a matter of definition. In general, not really.

However, there is one type of peripheral where "gaming" might actually be meaningful and it actually affects how the device has been designed and manufactured, rather than it merely being either meaningless marketing drivel, or just a synonym for "higher end product".

And that's "gaming" keyboards. At least in some cases.

How so?

The vast majority of keyboards do not support every single possible combination of simultaneous key press. For example even a simple 104-key keyboard has 2¹⁰⁴ possible keypress combinations, which is an absolutely humongous amount. Even a 64-bit value wouldn't be able to represent all of them.

Instead, most if not all keyboards have an internal circuitry design that supports only some combinations of simultaneous keys, but not nearly all of them. Typically the keys are, essentially, internally wired in a sort of grid pattern where keys on different rows and columns of the grid can be recognized simultaneously, but ones on the same rows or columns cannot. (In reality it's a bit more complicated than this, but that's the essential idea.) This saves an enormous amount of circuitry and electronic components, and thus it's much more cost-effective.

This "grid" doesn't need to follow the physical layout of the keyboard, though. The designers can route the connections however they want, thus shuffling the grid elements around to cover pretty much whatever keys they want (so, for example, one "row" of keys might consists of completely and seemingly randomly placed keys on the physical keyboard.)

Thus, the designers of the keyboard circuitry have a choice to make when it comes to which key presses are supported simultaneously and which aren't.

And here's where the "gaming" aspect of the design of a keyboard kicks in, quite literally: Usually the upper left of the alphabetical and numerical keys on a "gaming" keyboard will support significantly more simultaneous key presses than the rest of the keyboard, and this is precisely for better support in video games.

For example, I myself own a "gaming" keyboard, and it supports pressing all the ten keys QWERT plus ASDFG simultaneously without problems. However, if I press merely three keys, V, B and N, simultaneously, only two of them will register (the two that I press first).

An "office" keyboard would not need this peculiar choice of where the "densest" concentration of multiple supported key presses are located, but a "gaming" keyboard most definitely benefits from it.

This might be one of the best examples of where the "gaming" label is not a mere marketing gimmick, but actually indicates a hardware design choice for the explicit support of video games.