Why Millions Of Gamers Are Boycotting Asus

THE STATE OF ASUS: Did you know that the gaming community in general is

boycotting

Asus? In fact, we have seen a large number of videos with

millions

of views from big YouTubers encouraging and even leading this rebellion. And the craziest thing is that many of these YouTubers used to have extremely strong ties to Asus. Asus had given them tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, in free parts and sponsored videos. Not to mention, Asus was a fan favorite. Over the past two decades, Asus has built an extremely strong community and brand of enthusiast

gamers

called ROG or Republic of Gamers.

And it wasn't uncommon to see completely Asus-inspired setups like these within the gaming community. Asus was even managing to break into the high-end laptop and mobile markets, something that even Google and Samsung were struggling to maintain largely thanks to the strength of the ROG brand and the broader gaming community. But despite all this brand loyalty and value, it only took a few missteps involving abuse of customer trust, lack of accountability, and a bit of arrogance to turn the entire community against Asus. So, here's why

gamers

are fed up with Asus and are even going as far as to boycott the once-loved brand.

THE POOR GUY WILL BE FUCKED: If you're interested in getting paid by companies, check out our Silo bond investing app in the description below. But anyway, one of the biggest complaints against Asus is that they have slowly been moving away from what made them a beloved brand in the first place, which was high-quality hardware. These attributes were historically synonymous with the Asus brand. Whether it's ROG motherboards, ROG GPUs, or ROG peripherals, these were always by far the most expensive options you could get. Their motherboards, for example, cost up to $1,000. Their GPUs cost up to $2,400, which is $800 more than Nvidia charges, which is already a lot.

Even their keyboards usually cost more than $200. But, although it is expensive, enthusiasts were more than happy to spend that money to get the best hardware. In fact, much of the gaming community sees Asus as the elite brand, something they aspire to own similarly to Apple. But more recently, it seems like quality control has dropped substantially for Asus, especially when it comes to its budget lines. These problems have been especially evident with their motherboard and laptop lines. More and more threads have started to emerge about Asus motherboards and budget laptops that are about to die. And the worst thing is that many of these cases occur just 1 or 2 weeks after the warranty period ends.

So it almost seems like Asus is implementing some kind of planned obsolescence similar to what many people accuse Apple of. Even if it's not planned obsolescence, it's definitely poor quality. It seems that with budget lineups, Asus has resorted to creating disappointing products and slapping ROG branding on them to move units. This strategy has proven to be quite effective in terms of sales, but has left many customers quite disappointed. These problems have existed for a few years, but have largely been swept under the rug as a poor man's problem. As far as Asus's high-end hardware goes, it was still top of the line, so the majority of the community simply didn't care until problems started arising on flagship hardware as well.

RICH MAN GOT FUCKED: The activity that has put all this drama into overdrive is an enthusiastic hobby called overclocking. For most of us, the computers and phones we have are often overkill for browsing social media and simply watching YouTube videos, but when it comes to gaming, there is never too much power. Enthusiasts love to push their machines to the max and one way to achieve this is by overclocking their hardware, which is exactly what it sounds like. It is when you exceed the factory settings of your CPU, GPU, RAM and other components. For example, an off-the-shelf CPU might run at 4.5 GHz.

This means that each CPU core can complete 4.5 billion clock cycles per second. If this sounds crazy it's because it is. Technology has come a long way, but let's say you want even more power. Well, then you can go to your motherboard's BIOS and manually change the CPU frequency to 5.0 GHz. This would mean that each core of your CPU can now handle 5 billion clock cycles per second. However, to make this jump, you will need to increase the voltage powering the CPU and have a powerful cooling system, usually liquid cooling, to keep temperatures under control. If you push your CPU or any component too hard, you risk frying the component.

This probably seems like a risky hobby, and at one point, it definitely was. But, with the reliability and stability of modern chips and motherboards, overclocking is a common practice. If your computer feels like it's being pushed too hard, the worst that usually happens is that it shuts down. In fact, many enthusiast motherboards like those from Asus come with built-in automatic overclocking options. Gamers rarely take advantage of automatic overclocking and generally prefer manual overclocking, but this shows how common overclocking really is. And overclocking is one of the main selling points of high-end motherboards. Asus motherboards usually come with a friendly looking BIOS, different from what you might find on your laptop or at home.

On top of this, these motherboards are theoretically supposed to be extremely robust when it comes to feeding voltage to your CPUs and making sure your hardware isn't pushed too hard. That's why people are willing to spend more than $1,000 on their motherboards. To ensure your thousands of dollars worth of CPUs and motherboards don't burn out. But what happens when they fry anyway, regardless of whether you overclock or not? Well, that's precisely what started happening with Asus 670 chipset boards due to a faulty BIOS update. Since the BIOS update, users began to notice that the SOC voltage would randomly increase from 1.5 V to over 2 V.

The CPU temperatures would also randomly increase from the normal 40 degrees Celsius to 110 degrees Celsius. For my Celsius-illiterate friends, that's the same as 230 degrees Fahrenheit. If that sounds dangerously hot, that's because it is. It is hot enough to not only fry the CPU, but also cause it to burn and even explode. Now, luckily, a burning CPU won't set your house on fire, or at least not normally, but what it will surely do is ruin your CPU and motherboard and cost you thousands of dollars. And now that Asus was screwing over enthusiasts too, let's just say the community wasn't very happy.

ANTI-CONSUMER POLICIES: When this issue started to arise, people weren't really that angry with Asus. The reality is that when you have dozens of motherboards and BIOSes to maintain and update, chances are you're going to screw something up at some point. So, the gaming community accepted Asus' misstep. What really turned the gaming community against Asus was not their own mistakes, but how they decided to approach the situation. The correct course of action on Asus's part would have been to withdraw the BIOS update and compensate users affected by the faulty BIOS, but that is not what Asus did.

Instead, Asus would not only refuse to take responsibility, they would actively pass it on to consumers, and they weren't even smart about it. What did Asus do that was so anti-consumer? Well, they would release a beta BIOS update that was supposed to fix the overvoltage issue. But there was a problem. By updating to the beta BIOS, you void the warranty. Basically, they said, let's give these guys a short-term solution that may or may not work and relieve us of all liability at the same time that consumers are forced to upgrade to this new BIOS for fear of their CPUs burning out.

If that's not anti-consumer policy, I'm not sure what is. As you may have guessed, this announcement pushed the gaming community over the edge, leading to the viral videos we mentioned at the beginning. And as people started to look closer at Asus, they started to realize that those anti-consumer policies had been part of the company for years at that point. The thing is that most of them had been largely ignored or dismissed due to Asus' extremely strong brand image. We've already talked about the poor quality control of Asus' budget hardware, but looking back, it seemed like the high-end Asus boards also lacked quality control.

For example, in late 2021, a group of Asus Z690 boards literally caught fire because Asus allegedly accidentally reversed a capacitor on the board. Asus was recalling these boards from the market, so people cut them some slack, but looking back, Asus didn't recall these boards until 8 months after these boards started catching on fire. Imagine how many people were using these faulty boards on a daily basis and were at risk of a fire during this 8 month period. Also, it's not like people could replace their plates 8 months later because many of them didn't even know about the recall. As JayzTwoCents pointed out, looking back, Asus made one of the quietest recalls we've seen, which is largely counterintuitive.

Recalls should be well known and publicized so that people can replace their defective and even dangerous products, but that is not the direction Asus decided to take. The reality was that Asus had been failing with both budget products and enthusiast products, but no one really questioned Asus simply because their ROG branding and marketing was so strong. But now that the cat is out of the bag, what about Asus? STATUS QUO: Well, honestly, in the short term, not much. While much of the mainstream gaming community is

boycotting

Asus and opting for products from competitors like MSI, Gigabyte and EVGA, this hasn't really affected Asus' revenue, results or share price.

In fact, they are almost at their all-time high. And the main reason for this is that the Asus brand has grown far beyond the gaming community. Marques Brownlee, for example, has several videos about Asus ROG phones, all with

millions

of views. And Marques does not manage any type of specialized gaming channel. He runs one of the most watched technology channels on the planet. In other words, Asus has enormous exposure outside of the gaming community. From a business point of view this was a great step by Asus, they have clearly increased their audience, but this is not so good for consumers.

The average person who buys an Asus phone probably has no idea about all of its shortcomings and anti-consumer policies. In fact, they may be partially buying an Asus phone thinking they're moving away from all of Apple's anti-consumer policies, when in reality they're simply switching to another brand that benefits a lot from the brand image and not all of that customer-friendly stuff. consumers. The good news is that Asus can't continue this behavior forever. If they do, it's only a matter of time until they make an even bigger misstep with one of their most widespread devices on the market.

And while they can survive JaysTwoCents and Gamers Nexus turning on them, a video like this one from Marque Brownlee on his main channel may prove too difficult to overcome. Will Asus change its ways and start serving the customer once again? Well, judging by history, that's not usually how these kinds of things happen. So, Asus's fundamental decline has most likely begun, and it's only a matter of time until this ignorance and arrogance spreads to the rest of its business as well. And that is why the gaming community is boycotting Asus. Do you have any Asus hardware and if so would you consider purchasing them again given their anti-consumer behavior?

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