Over the last three to five years, the worlds of gaming and supplements have collided in a big way. Dozens of companies big and small have been doing everything they can to become and stay relevant to players looking to get that extra edge or boost of energy during their long gaming and live streaming sessions. While these supplements have come in all forms and formulations, one factor seems to be universally accepted among the vast majority of brands: proprietary blends. While on the surface, they might not seem very harmful, they have become a crutch on which too many companies are leaning in order to stay profitable at the cost of efficacious products for our consumers. Focus by Advanced.gg seeks to break the mold and finally give gamers the ability to trust their gaming supplements with transparent labeling and fully dosed ingredients.
You may have seen a proprietary blend before and not even realized. Sometimes they have cool names like “Energy Matrix” or “Focus Synergy Blend” but the heart of what they are trying to accomplish remains the same. A proprietary blend is a mix of ingredients that are all listed together on a product facts panel under a single weight. According to FDA regulations, this is allowable as long as the ingredients are listed in descending order of weight within their given blend.
The problem, though, is that consumers have very little to no ability to decipher exactly what they’re consuming with each dose. While they can see the names of the ingredients, the specific amounts of each individual ingredient remain a mystery. Sometimes, companies are willing to reveal amounts of certain ingredients within blends, like caffeine, but from there it’s mostly guesswork.
In our opinion, this is a worse problem than the industry would care to admit. It allows formulators to put many ingredients into a product in minuscule amounts simply to say “Our product contains X, Y, and Z.” For the general population, there is simply no way to look at a label critically to figure out if their product of choice is doing as it claims. For argument’s sake, let’s consider the fictional ingredient: BrainX. Studies have found that consuming 500mg of BrainX has the ability to increase gaming skills by 30 percent!
The consumer buys a product that contains BrainX but the ingredient is part of a proprietary blend. The blend contains five ingredients and weighs a total of 700mg. When we look at the blend, we see that BrainX is listed last on the list, thus determining that it weighs the least of the five pieces of this puzzle. Obviously, this means that there is no way the consumer is getting the clinically studied dose of BrainX that they think they are getting. While someone who knows what to look for would spot this fairly quickly, the layman might just look at the label, see BrainX, and be happy that they’re getting this great product when they’re only getting a fraction of what has been shown to be effective.
There is a massive wave of companies using this method to make formulations look stronger, but Advanced refuses to be one of them. Our product, Focus, has a fully transparent label so that anyone interested in learning about what they are consuming can understand without any mystery or doubt. Our ingredients were chosen to be provided at a specific dose for our players’ benefit, and we want them to see the work that we put in. Next time you’re trying to decide if you want to jump in with a new product, look at the back of the label. See a huge list of ingredients under a single weight? You might consider trying products that endeavor to be more clear.
