Last week’s poll brings bad news for the new Asus ROG phones – they are too expensive. Of the two, the Asus ROG Phone 9 Pro has the best shot at attaining some popularity. Yes, it costs more, but it is also more capable.
The Asus ROG Phone 9, meanwhile, had very few votes in its favor, so let’s start by looking at its poll results first. As you can see from the green segment, there are more people interested in the 9 Pro than the vanilla 9. That is if they are going with Asus at all, other gaming phones seem more popular, judging by the polls and the comments.
The Asus ROG Phone 9 Pro fares better, but it is clear that its premium price tag is too much for most gamers. As commenters point out, gaming phones have not only other gaming phones to contend with, they also need to win over the likes of the Asus ROG Ally and the Valve Steam Deck. These offer access to the PC library of games, years of support and are cheaper than the ROG Phones.
Speaking of support, that was a major point of criticism for both – Asus got no points for extending the security patch window to 4 years and having only 2 OS updates on a $1,000+ phone is turning many people away. The locked bootloader isn’t helping matters – gamers are more likely than most to run custom software, which could have extended the useful life of the phones, but Asus prefers to keep them locked down.
It turns out that the company has managed to turn away some old fans as well – for example, the older Asus ROG Phones had front-facing speakers, they didn’t need the help of a case for that (the 9-series have cases with “Audio Redirection” since one of their speakers points down). Another thing that was lost when the screen bezels shrunk was the unblemished screen – now the ROGs have a punch-holed selfie camera like all the other phones (well, some gaming phones have under-display cameras instead).
Asus has proven that enthusiast brands like Republic of Gamers can charge higher prices – but they also need to offer quality and features to live up to that price. And the ROG Phone 9 and 9 Pro have the value-for-money balance wrong.