ASUS Talks ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X – “This Is The Way Forward For Us”

Last week, I spent an afternoon at the Steam Whistle Brewery in downtown Toronto. A short walk away from the CN Tower, Scotiabank Arena, and the Rogers Centre, I didn't cross the tourists in this bustling hub to play hooky for a beer or two at the downtown brewery. I was there on behalf of Wccftech to spend a little more hands-on time with the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X, as well as hear from Whitson Gordon, ASUS's head of content for ROG and senior manager of marketing content, and Sascha Krohn, the global director of technical marketing at ASUS.

By this point, I had already spent a week with the ROG Xbox Ally X for my review of the device, (which you can find here), but having one at home meant that while I was at the event, I was more interested in seeing what Gordon and Krohn had to say about the device than getting to spend a little more hands-on time with it.

So after they both gave presentations, when I got the chance to sit down with them (or more accurately, stand outside with them while we all stood around a wooden barrel operating as a showtable for some of the laptops ASUS was showing off), I knew I had to start by asking them about the price of the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X.

As a reminder, the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally, the lower-spec'd, cheaper version of the new ASUS and Xbox handheld, comes in at $599 USD (or $799 CAD), while the higher spec'd, top-end, more expensive Xbox Ally X costs a whopping $999 USD (or $1299 CAD). For context, you can take home the original ASUS ROG Ally for $499 USD, and the ASUS ROG Ally X for $799. So it's a $100 price increase if you're going from the ASUS ROG Ally to the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally, and a $200 increase if you're going from the ASUS ROG Ally X to the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally X.

There are hardware differences between each device, with even the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally getting the next-generation AMD Ryzen Z2 A processor compared to the ASUS ROG Ally X's AMD Ryzen Z1, but these are absolutely not cheap devices. There's a lot you can buy for that kind of money, so I was curious as to how ASUS and Microsoft reached those prices, and if the fact that firms like Circana are reporting that 30% of US consumers will spend less on video games and entertainment as the cost of essentials continues to rise is a concern for them when pricing devices like this.

But just before I got into any of that, I had to ask a much simpler question. What is this thing even called? And by that I meant, what do these marketing executives for ASUS call a product with a far too long, and far too confusing name?

"I usually just call it the ROG Xbox Ally X. Or the Xbox Ally X. I try not to call it the Ally X, because then it gets confusing with the ROG Ally X," Gordon replied. It's a mouthful, I pointed out, and a confusing one at that. Krohn added that from his point of view internally, particularly when speaking with internal engineering teams, he addresses the two variants as the "XA" and the "YA," with the XA representing the ROG Xbox Ally X, and the YA representing the ROG Xbox Ally. He also mentioned that he will sometimes refer to them as their project codenames, which were Omni for the ROG Xbox Ally, and Horeseman for the ROG Xbox Ally X.

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For me, at least, this hastened my resolve that the devices' actual names are atrocious. Even Gordon's answer showed that they're very confusing when compared to ASUS's other products. Especially when you start getting into the weeds of what is and what isn't an Xbox, and the importance of Xbox software and services like Xbox Game Pass to the ROG Xbox Ally line. And speaking of Xbox Game Pass, its recent price increase that saw players rush to cancel their subscriptions led me right back to talking about the pricing for the ROG Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X.

"I probably can't give you the detail that you want, because that starts getting into business contracts, and in general, we don't discuss those kinds of things," Gordon began when answering how ASUS and Microsoft reached their pricing for the ROG Xbox Ally handhelds. "Geopolitics," added Krohn. "What I can say," Gordon continued, "Is that, especially for the ROG Ally series of handhelds, trying to hit a good, affordable price has always been a big priority for us. We have had people ask us in the past, 'Oh, I want this big list of super premium features, can't you just release a $1500 handheld, I would pay for it.'"

"The reality is, if you're trying to really introduce a new form factor to the gaming world, if you want to really build that volume of people using the device, you've got to hit an affordable price point. And it's one of the reasons we have two SKUs now, is to make sure that we can cover as many of our bases as possible that and as many people can access this new era of handheld gaming."

It was at this point that I brought up the aforementioned Circana report, because having two SKUs does at least give people options, but $599 USD still puts the ROG Xbox Ally in the premium range, especially since that's right in between the cost of an Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S console. It's also more expensive than a base PS5 and slightly more expensive than the 512GB model of the Steam Deck OLED. The ROG Xbox Ally X, for its part, is $50 off from the Lenovo Legion Go 2, which is due out at the end of this month. Gaming has never been a cheap hobby, but it's arguably more expensive than ever, at a time when everything else seems more expensive than ever. So, where does the cost of living and what people have to pay for fit into pricing discussions?

"That's absolutely always on our minds," Gordon begins. "We know that cost of living is a thing that's on everybody's minds, that's one of the reasons we want to try and hit as affordable a price point as we can. We just know that's an economic reality of the world."

"Maybe don't necessarily look at it as a replacement for the devices that we have in the market," Krohn adds. "We already have the ROG Ally and the ROG Ally X in the market right now, and I think this is a trend that you see in recent years with all sorts of devices: phones, laptops, and even graphics cards and CPUs. The new generation that comes out doesn't necessarily replace the previous one, but it adds to the product stack and sits on top of the product stack. That's the new stuff, and the previous generation stuff still sticks around for a little bit. So I think that's one way of looking at it, and I would say it's not necessarily replacing what's on the market right now, it's just adding something to it. And there's still a lot of value in the devices that are on the market right now."

"At least as long as those are still on shelves," Gordon interjects. "And that's true with all of our products, you see the same thing happen with laptops, the last generation is always around for people who want to get a good deal on that, until the new generation kind of supplants them, and that cycle continues."

It was clear to me that Gordon and Krohn wanted to send the message that if you're concerned about the pricing of these new ROG Xbox Ally handhelds, the older generation is always there for you. But it wasn't exactly a Don Mattrick moment, because it's not like some of the new features coming to the ROG Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X are going to be exclusive to those devices. Namely, the software and UI upgrades that the Xbox Ally devices come with out of the box; those are coming to the ROG Ally and Ally X as updates on the Xbox Ally/Ally X launch day.

"That's precisely why we had the discussion, and ultimately decided, both us and Xbox, to bring the full screen experience, not just to the latest handhelds, but also the existing ones," Krohn said. "So, like I said, it's more like we're viewing this as a complete lineup of ROG Ally handhelds, which starts with the original ROG Ally, and then the ROG Ally X on top, and then you have the ROG Xbox Ally X at the very top, and the ROG Xbox Ally, with the Z2 A, really great battery life and efficiency, somewhat on the side, like between the Ally X and the OG Ally, and we have those different price points, different performance tiers, battery life tiers, so we have four devices in total, and the current generation is absolutely still in play, and super interesting, especially from a price-to-performance perspective."

So that's the case for now and for the short-term future of these devices, since ASUS is not likely to release a ROG Xbox Ally and Xbox Ally X hardware refresh or upgrade within the next year. But what about beyond that? I asked Krohn and Gordon very directly if these new ROG Xbox Ally devices are now their own line of hardware running alongside the ROG Ally line, or if the ROG Xbox Ally is now overtaking the ROG Ally line.

"No, this is the way forward for us. The ROG Xbox Ally is the direction that we're headed with this lineup of products," Gordon said very definitively.

So if these devices are the way forward, and, as Gordon had mentioned several times in his presentation earlier that afternoon, this device is meant to provide a console-like experience and be a way into the PC gaming handheld space for console gamers, I wanted to hear more definitively about who Gordon and Krohn thought this device was for. (I touch on the question of who this handheld is really for more in my review, and why it was important for me to ask this question, which you can go check out now as a reminder.)

"I think it's for PC gamers, Xbox gamers, anyone who wants to play these latest titles that are popular on current-generation platforms, and we're seeing all these platforms sort of start to merge together," Gordon began. "Sony games coming to PC, Xbox games coming to PlayStation. Overall, the gaming ecosystem is really coming together in a way that we haven't seen in the past, and it's kind of freeing, right? Anyone who wants the best handheld experience on the go, to play all of these games, this is it."

"I would say it's a lot of things for a lot of different people," Krohn added. "It's two different devices that we are launching right now, and they're fairly different in their application, and what their strength is, what they're meant for, and what people find interesting about them, and I would say for anybody who is into PC gaming handhelds, what the ROG Xbox Ally X is: more performance, longer battery life, better erganomics, and much improved user interface."

"For an Xbox console user, it is 'Wow, I can now take all my games with me, on the go, and I can even have access to game modding,' which is maybe something they're interested in. And they now have access to different catalogues of games, something like Spider-Man, maybe. So, I think to different people, it has a different appeal."

One level of appeal that the ROG Xbox Ally devices lack is the inclusion of an OLED screen. And especially after hearing Krohn talk about the new Lumina Pro OLED screens from ASUS, I had to wonder if those screens would find their way inside a future ROG Xbox Ally device.

Gordon stepped up to answer this question, saying, "We know that a lot of people are really interested in getting that kind of display experience on the Ally. There are a few reasons that we haven't done it yet. One of them is, like we talked about earlier, cost, trying to make sure that it stays affordable. Another is power usage."

"So, one really interesting thing is, we don't want to give up Variable Refresh Rate (VRR), and for a long time, that was something that was not as easily done on OLEDs and portable devices like this, and the current method for doing that on an OLED screen is more powerful, than what you're getting on this really great IPS display that we have on the Ally."

"It looks excellent, and it's very power-efficient, and one of the most important things we have learned over the last two years of building the Ally is that battery life is one of the highest priorities. We don't want to give that up for an OLED screen that doesn't have an optimal solution for VRR. So, it's always on our radar, it's always something that we're testing, but it's just not quite where we want it to be yet for what we think is the best experience."

So, it looks like we'll have to wait a little while longer to see a Lumina Pro OLED screen, or any OLED screen for that matter, in an ROG Xbox Ally handheld device. And probably pay at least $1K for it. For now, it seems like the ROG Xbox Ally line will keep Xbox in the hardware business, even if it is ASUS behind the wheel and Microsoft slapping an Xbox logo on top.

Thank you to Whitson Gordon and Sascha Krohn for speaking with me and for being so generous with their time and answers.

This interview was edited for clarity.

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