ROG’s booth

The ROG booth was on the large hall on the right at the Tokyo Games Show 2024, not far from the Event Stage and THQ‘s own booth as well. Probably not as good a location as last year’s, but still very decent. The booth was full of ROG branded products, ROG smartphones, ROG desktops and laptops, motherboards and other hardware, and at the very center the ROG Ally X received all the attention. A lot of units were available to try out several games.

This year the company released the new iteration of their handheld, the ROG Ally X. Larger battery, more storage, and a few other improvements make it a stronger competitor against the Steam Deck. It’s for sure one of the strongest alternatives out there. Lenovo’s unit is too big and too expensive, OneXplayer has too many variants of varying quality, and MSI’s Intel machine is a little behind in performance to say the least.

I could grab a few minutes of a ROG representative to ask a few questions.

Interview about the ROG Ally

This is the interview with Ayaka Sugiyama, working for the Marketing Department of ASUS Japan:

In a few bullet points, this is what we could gather:

• From ROG’s standpoint, the market for portable gaming wasn’t very active when they released the ROG Ally, but it became very popular afterwards. That’s why many other companies are releasing similar products now.
• One of the special features of the ROG Ally X is its battery life - it has doubled compared to last year and storage capacity increased from 550GB to 1TB.
• Compared to the ROG Ally X, some might find the overall weight a little heavier. However, many people think that’s acceptable given how good it performs now. They also cite the display quality as a key diffentiator.
• They plan to keep promoting and selling both versions of the ROG Ally.
• The Japanese market is important ROG Ally in terms of sales - Japan ranks second after the US, but exact numbers are not given.
• As for future updates, the overall size will remain similar with no plans to release different sizes like Lenovo’s Legion Go.
• Not sure how fast they will release new versions of the ROG Ally in the future. Not sure they will release a new one every year.
• It’s not clear who is number 1 in terms of global sales on the Portable PC Gaming market. At least they don’t want to disclose anything.

Where is this market going next?

Nobody wants to release any number in terms of sales. I guess this means that the market is far from the size of the Switch’s right now, and it may not look good no matter what. The ROG Ally X was also probably a quick iteration on the ROG Ally to fix the battery life issue that made it less attractive in the first place. In hands, the ROG Ally X feels pretty good. It’s 100g heavier than the previous one, but you don’t really notice it that much at least in a few minutes of gameplay.

Right now, the Steam Deck is in a tough spot to differentiate. Everyone can produce a me-too product, and while they don’t have the convenience of SteamOS, fundamentally it’s not that different once you are in the game. Valve probably needs to make it difficult for other companies to imitate them. They can try to be cheaper, yes. But I’m convinced they need to move ahead and make their own hardware (ARM64 based?) that nobody else can produce.