Late last week, at the preview event for the ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X, outside of getting my hands-on the upcoming devices, I had the opportunity to speak with the marketing team for ASUS’s gaming division about the devices’ reception, the current handheld ecosystem, the improvements from the original ROG Ally series, and more. Shacknews: Since you folks were at Gamecom, how was the reception for the ROG Xbox Ally, since that was a more public event? Sascha Khron, Director of Technical Marketing, ASUS: The reception was great. People were super excited. Especially when you go to an event like Gamescom, which is all about the games, and you see people excited about hardware, that’s always a very good sign. People were loving it. We had so many demos there, and people were coming and trying all sorts of games on it. We got really great feedback. It’s interesting because everybody saw the device first, and a lot of people had concerns over the aesthetics of it, let’s put it that way. Once they got their hands on it, they were like, “Oh, wow, this feels amazing. It’s so comfortable. It doesn’t feel heavy at all.” Everything just melted away, and then they didn’t have any concerns anymore. There were some people there who you could tell they were kind of, like, skeptics. They came over, they had hands on, they were smiling, had a good time, and walked away with a smile. I think that was really good. Reception was very good. Shacknews: For people that already have a handheld system, like a Nintendo Switch 2 or a Steam Deck, how does Microsoft want to handle or entice players that already have the means to play a handheld? Krohn: From our point of view, if you look at what we do, we have so many different products, right? Yeah. We have so many that overlap with each other, right? People are telling us why you already have a similar product. Why are you doing one that’s, you know, not all that different? Well, the answer is, we believe that more options are better, basically. We are not, like, one size fits all. We want to give people as many options as possible. We are happy that there’s competition in the market. I think for PC gaming handhelds, we nailed it. We’re dominating the competition. That’s always a great space to be in. We’re getting copied a lot. There are others using the same panels as us, same internal layout and joysticks. I think we are welcoming that it’s great to have competition. It’s great to see what others are doing. I think even those people who are not all that into the ROG Xbox Ally, maybe they’re skeptics and they have a Steam Deck and they’re happy with it, or they have a Switch 2, and they’re happy with it. I think they, too, will appreciate that. There are more options, and there are alternatives. I would just encourage them, give it a try. It is really interesting. It’s really fun if you want more performance, and for anybody who’s running a Steam Deck. A lot of people like the Steam Deck because of the ergonomics. Well, guess what? Arguably, for me, at least, if you asked me, ergonomics are better on ours than on the Steam Deck. No offense. I love you, Gabe [Newell]. Shacknews: When you play games that are more intensive, it’ll cause it to overheat very quickly, or the fans will be very loud. How is the ROG Xbox Ally trying to mitigate that and make sure the newest, most high-profile games aren’t having any issues with fans? Krohn: For the original ROG Ally and the ROG Ally X, we already did a really good job of that. Most users are really happy with the cooling and the performance. What we did is specifically for the ROG Xbox Ally series; we improved the cooling even further. The fan is much thicker. We increased the air flow significantly, and that’s because the Z2 Extreme [Processor] has a higher [Thermal Design Power], so it’s 35 Watts now instead of 30. Our target was, we want to be able to have the same acoustics, the same low noise, fan noise as on the previous generation with the higher wattage of the new generation. That’s why we increased the airflow. What you’re getting on the new ROG Xbox Ally in performance mode and in silent mode is actually the same noise as on the previous generation, but there’s actually a headroom. You can actually lower it by two to three decibels and make it even quieter. That’s really important because most people play this in bed at night. A lot of people do. You have it close to your face right at night in bed, where you can really hear even a small whisper. We improved the thermos and acoustics even more. Shacknews: For Xbox players, is it easy to transfer their game library to the ROG Xbox Ally? Is it seamless? Whitson Gordon, Senior Manager of Marketing Content, Gaming at ASUS: I’ll explain to you how that library is going to function. Different games will respond a little bit differently. So if you have a game that’s playable anywhere, which over a thousand games on that Xbox Library are playable anywhere, that’s going to be synced to your saves. You’re not going to ever need to think about it for some of the games that you have that aren’t playable anywhere. If you have some of those older Xbox titles, a lot of those are going to be streamable from the Cloud through Xbox Cloud gaming. Shacknews: Most of the time, it takes many years to release something like this to improve on the predecessor. How did you folks do it in two years? When did you expedite a lot of work? Gordon: Our team, both our team and Xbox’s team, have been working so hard on this, and it is interesting you bring that up because one of the things that Microsoft has said in the past at these events is they wanted to get a handheld out fast. They know that that’s one of the areas where we can be really agile because we are first and foremost a hardware manufacturer. So we’ve already got this handheld. We were already kind of thinking about the next generation. When they say, “We want to get a handheld out as fast as possible, let’s work with ASUS, ’cause it could be out in the next year.” For us, it’s kind of the same thing there, right? We want this seamless console experience. We want someone who has a relationship with developers to start targeting this hardware and really, really up the ante for gamers who are buying these devices. Microsoft, who’s already a partner of ours and we were already working with on some of that Ally stuff, we can talk to them and really make something special. They know that software, they already have that software, and can really, but at the same time, the level of collaboration between the Xbox team and the Windows team is unprecedented. The way that have they come together and been able to talk about what these background processes do? Next step? They told us that that was a really, really new thing for them, but also really exciting. There’s a lot that goes into it. But we are really agile with hardware development, I mean, even a year after the original ROG Ally, we came out with the Ally X. We can adapt quickly when we know that the users want it and that there’s a fervent demand for it. I don’t think I have seen the community react to one of our products as fervently and as passionately as the original ROG Ally. We’re always thinking about what’s next. We can’t always say publicly what’s next, but like I’m not going to sit here and tell you that we’re not already thinking about what the future might hold. We’re always working and thinking about this stuff. Shacknews: How has the reception been for the ROG Xbox Ally? Gordon: It was really positive. We had done a couple of these media things, and we’d seen some kind of early previews. The response to that was already really good. Seeing it in the hands of the public is very different, so it was really exciting. To get to see all of these people try it out and hear their feedback. It was crazy to hear. For example, one thing that people said to me over and over and over at Gamescom was, “It feels so much lighter than I expected.” Everyone was saying that. It’s really fun to see what kind of things people latch onto, and I didn’t expect that to be such a common piece of feedback. The reason that it feels so light is ’cause of those ergonomic grips. When you’re holding that original Ally, it’s propped up on your palms in a way that puts a little bit more pressure there. Whereas with the grips, it’s spreading out that weight distribution. When something is more comfortable like that, your brain perceives the weight as lighter. I didn’t know that that was going to be the thing that everyone came up to me and said. You just never know how people are going to interpret the changes you made. Shacknews: One of the biggest issues of the predecessor was the battery life. There were some games where it would only last an hour if the game was intensive enough. How about those fixes this time around? Gordon: When we built the original ROG Ally, one of our biggest priorities was the weight. Making it as lightweight as possible. We learned pretty quickly that people cared more about that battery life than they did about how lightweight it was. Which is why when we built the Ally X, we doubled the size of the battery. Slap that 80-watt battery in there. That’s what people really want. That’s the top priority. If you have an older handheld that you’ve been holding onto for a few years. This is a pretty exciting jump in a lot of ways.
https://www.shacknews.com/article/146354/asus-developer-rog-xbox-ally-interview
How ASUS’s developers feel about ROG Xbox Ally and collaboration with Microsoft
