Updated, 5/22/2018, 9:10am PT: Asus has confirmed that the company is not making any changes to its Arez brand.
Updated, 5/22/2018, 7:55am PT: The Asus Arez Twitter account cited in this article has been exposed as a fake account and taken down. As such, there is likely no change to the Arez branding. We have followed up with Asus for more information.
Original article, 5/22/2018, 11:10am PT:
Asus announced that it would no longer be releasing Arez-branded AMD graphics cards, and that Republic of Gamers (ROG) brand is here to stay.
The announcement was quietly posted on the company’s Arez brand Twitter account over the weekend, just a few weeks after Nvidia pulled the plug on its notorious GeForce Partner Program, which some pinned as the cause of Asus’s (and other OEM’s) new all-AMD graphics card branding. The Arez lineup was announced last month, but the new branding will never see the light of day.
“#ASUS #AREZ is coming to an end,” stated the Asus_Arez Twitter feed. “#ROG is here to stay.”
Although Nvidia has maintained that the GPP was intended to keep brands and communication consistent and transparent, some conjectured that the program would place an unnecessary burden on partners to create new brands or face a potential backlash (language in the published GPP materials stated that partners would get “early access to our latest innovations,” whereas non-partners wouldn’t).
Several companies have made similar branding changes, with MSI announcing a new AMD-based GPU brand after the GPP was shut down. However, Asus is the first AIB partner to reverse course on the AMD-exclusive branding, and it’s hard to argue that these changes aren’t remotely connected by a large, green thread.
