ASUS Retires Radeon “AREZ” Brand: ROG Reigns Supreme

Not long since the termination of NVIDIA’s ill-fated GeForce Partner Program (GPP), over the weekend ASUS quietly announced via Twitter that the “AREZ” brand is to be retired, indicating that products would fall back under the “Republic of Gamers” umbrella. After NVIDIA announced the GPP in March, AIB partners had begun to rebrand their AMD Radeon cards and seemingly separate them from their established gaming sub-brands, pursuing the general GPP goal of aligning GeForce products to GeForce-exclusive brands. The highest profile example happened to be ASUS, where this corresponded to new AREZ and the established ROG brands – leading AMD to announce its “Freedom of Choice” advertising initiative.

#ASUS #AREZ is coming to an end, #ROG is here to stay.

— ASUS AREZ (@ASUS_AREZ) May 20, 2018

As it originally panned out, ROG STRIX was replaced by AREZ STRIX, and elsewhere it was noted that Gigabyte had dropped “Aorus” and MSI had dropped “Gaming” from Radeon products. To that end, when NVIDIA finally terminated the program at the beginning of the month, the pending dissolution of AREZ was a logical conclusion, though by no means a certain one. By nature, the business dealings between GPU manufacturers and AIB partners/OEMs are largely private, where GPP’s public demise may have little to do with the underlying agreements. And therein lies NVIDIA’s credibility issue with GPP, a program that had the ostensible public goal of consumer transparency. Whatever the written or unwritten GPP stipulations were, NVIDIA did not seem interested in divulging the details necessary to correct the rampant speculation – and maintaining public silence only added to the secrecy. Likewise, OEMs and board partners had little to gain by independently commenting on the matter.

AMD, for that matter, has been limited in its public actions as they would not want to directly or indirectly damage their own relationships with the same OEMs and AIB partners, especially if it resulted in forcing them to ‘pick sides.’ Hence, with the “Freedom of Choice” re-framing of Radeon containment brands with a positive spin, as opposed to pressuring AIB partners to defy NVIDIA by keeping Radeon under the original branding. In that way, positioning AREZ in that manner let AMD respond while ASUS stayed in NVIDIA’s good graces, as officially NVIDIA did note that they did not care as long as it was a GeForce-only brand.

Inasmuch as social media is a sometimes-official-sometimes-not mouthpiece, in a later reply the ASUS AREZ Twitter account did call out GPP by name, providing perhaps the closest that we will get to any official confirmation about the nature of exclusive GPP branding. But at least for consumers, the ROG ecosystem and community is once again neutral to GeForce or Radeon. The fate of other sub-brands remains to be seen.