ROG Ally celebrates its 1-year anniversary today, June 13, 2024. Below, we take a look back at how it overcame its launch woes to become a viable Steam Deck competitor, and a sign of just how open the portable market can be.
Considering how much the portable gaming market has exploded since Valve launched the Steam Deck in early 2022, it’s remarkable that its closest competitor is only a year old. More than a year after the Steam Deck hit the market, Asus followed up with the ROG Ally, a Windows-based gaming handheld that was, on paper, a big step up from Valve’s handheld. Not only was it more powerful (and potentially significantly so), but it offered an experience that Valve’s Linux SteamOS lacked at the time in terms of game and launcher compatibility. It wasn’t long before the Ally’s biggest draw was also seen as its Achilles heel, but despite initial problems adapting Windows to a device it was never intended to work seamlessly with, the ROG Ally proved there was more than enough consumer demand and variability to make it incredibly successful.
In May 2023, Asus announced the ROG Ally just as Valve was starting to get a grip on Steam Deck supply issues. For the longest time, Steam Decks have been incredibly difficult to get your hands on with a limited release in a few regions and demand completely outstripping supply. The antidote to that bitter pill was the ROG Ally, which went global due to Asus’ much more established distribution network, giving those with a Steam Deck-sized hole in their heart another option. It also competed on price, with its top-spec model coming in at just $50 more than the equivalent Steam Deck. For this, you got a larger display, a higher resolution of 1080p with a refresh rate of 120Hz and, above all, support for a variable refresh rate. The ROG Ally was comparable in size and weight to the Steam Deck, albeit with somewhat less favorable ergonomics, as many would discover when they got their hands on it. Still, with nearly eight times the theoretical performance thanks to the latest Z1 Extreme chip inside courtesy of AMD, it looked like zero in a world currently ruled by the weaker and less attainable Steam Deck.
Another big draw was Windows, which makes the ROG Ally compatible with anything you might want to play on a desktop PC. Steam Deck launched with SteamOS, a highly customized version of Linux that allowed Valve to turn its handheld into a console, albeit at the expense of compatibility. Many games, especially those with certain anti-cheat systems, were (and still aren’t) compatible with the operating system, while getting games from other launchers to work required some tinkering. SteamOS was also incredibly buggy in the months after launch, not outright supporting Game Pass for PC due to its Windows Store requirement. Windows support seemed like a viable solution to these issues, and one that gave the ROG Ally even more appeal. Not only would Game Pass work seamlessly, but switching between Steam, the Epic Games Store, and more would work just like on any other desktop.
However, the problem that became apparent after launch wasn’t that the ROG Ally wasn’t able to take on the Steam Deck from a hardware perspective, but that its chosen operating system simply wasn’t up to the task of being used in a pocketable format. Navigating Windows on the ROG Ally was cumbersome, and Asus’ own attempt to wrap the experience in Armory Crate software was nowhere near as slick and seamless as the much more advanced SteamOS. ROG Ally couldn’t pause and pause games when you turned Ally off, which is a staple in the handheld world, but a logical choice when Windows on a desktop never required it when gaming. It created a lot of friction between the freedom of choice and the user experience on the device, which very quickly led to the assumption that despite the surprisingly small difference in performance, the Steam Deck was still the preferred device.
And yet the ROG Ally has found a large, vocal audience. It has been praised for its compatibility with all launch devices, specifically making it easier to use Game Pass on the go. Its performance, while nowhere near the expected jump over the Steam Deck, was still enough to make the argument worthwhile, even if it came at the expense of battery life. Its display wasn’t revolutionary, but the higher refresh rate and variable refresh rate support gave it a significant advantage over the Steam Deck, the latter being especially important on a mobile device that can’t always maintain a consistent frame rate. Despite its inability to significantly overcome the barriers that Microsoft itself doesn’t have with Windows on this type of hardware, the ROG Ally has become a strong choice for those with specific needs, becoming exactly what it promised to be – an improvement over the Steam Deck. which would ensure strong competition in this blossoming market.
Its effect was also noticeable. Before the launch of the ROG Ally, the Steam Deck ran almost unopposed in terms of price-performance ratio, but since then it has had to compete not only with Asus, but also with Lenovo, MSI, Ayaneo and new players in the market such as Zotac. They each try to differentiate themselves with small iterations on the same basic formula with varying degrees of success. Still, it’s Asus and its ROG Ally that have made it to the Steam Deck and remain its most popular competition. It’s a product Asus believes in too, with the announcement of a new iteration launched just over a year after the original. Aiming to address some of the original’s shortcomings, the Asus ROG Ally X comes with slightly redesigned ergonomics, interchangeable thumbsticks, a significantly larger battery and better cooling aspects. It’s not the follow-up that some might be hoping for as both Asus and Valve await the expected significant performance boost from AMD’s upcoming chips. When that day finally arrives, however, it will be fascinating to see how the second round of this match plays out, with consumers ultimately the biggest winners.