“MSI afterburner project is probably dead” – Claims Lead Developer

MSI has reportedly abandoned the development of their popular Afterburner software  

Update – MSI has released the following statement regarding their support for MSI Afterburner. As mentioned below, sanctions against Russian have prevented MSI from transferring payments to the developer’s bank account. MSI are searching for ways to solve this issue, but international sanctions have left the company with few options. 

    Our product marketing & accounting team are dealing with this problem now. Due to the war, our payment couldn’t transfer to the author’s bank account successfully. We are still keeping in touch with him and figuring out how to solve this

 

Alexey Nicolaychuk, the developer known as “Unwinder” has confirmed that the development of MSI Afterburner may be coming to an end, with MSI having “semi-abandoned” the project as a consequence of Russia’s war against Ukraine.

MSI Afterburner is a popular GPU overclocking software that is commonly used by PC gamers to overclock their graphics cards, monitor system thermals, create custom fan profiles, monitor game performance, take screenshots, and PC benchmarking. No other branded overclocking tool is as feature rich as MSI Afterburner. Should MSI Afterburner’s development end, there is no competing overclocking tool that offers gamers the same feature set.  

When asked why the development of MSI Afterburner is in jeopardy, the Russian developer stated that MSI had “stopped performing their obligations under (the) Afterburner license agreement” almost a year ago. MSI are unable to fulfil their obligations due to Russia’s war against Ukraine and the resulting sanctions against Russia. Unwinder has continued to develop MSI Afterburner without MSI’s support for the past eleven months, but without payment this support cannot continue indefinitely.

As it stands, MSI cannot support Afterburner’s continued development due to sanctions against Russia. There is nothing that MSI can do about this. As such, MSI cannot be seen as a villain for not supporting Afterburner’s development. If there is a villain here, it is Vladimir Putin. Had his invasion of Ukraine not occurred, MSI Afterburner’s development would have continued without any issues.

Below is what Unwinder had to say about MSI Afterburner’s continued development. 

    War and politics are the reasons. I didn’t mention it in MSI Afterburner development news thread, but the project is semi abandoned by company during quite a long time already. Actually we’re approaching one year mark since the day when MSI stopped performing their obligations under Afterburner license agreement due to “politic situation”. I tried to continue performing my obligations and worked on the project on my own during the last 11 months, but it resulted in nothing but disappointment; I have a feeling that I’m just beating a dead horse and waste energy on something that is no longer needed by company. Anyway I’ll try to continue supporting it myself while I have some free time, but will probably need to drop it and switch to something else, allowing me to pay my bills.

RivaTuner Statistic Server’s development will continue

The good news for PC gamers is that Unwinder’s other project, RivaTuner Statistic Server (RTSS), is not having its development discontinued. RTSS is a separate project from MSI Afterburner, and it will continue to be supported even if MSI Afterburner’s development ends.  

    Everything I said above is related to Afterburner project, but I said nothing about discontinuing RTSS development. It is separate and fully hobbyist application created many years before MSI Afterburner was even born. RTSS still gives me a lot of fun to develop it and design new functionality for it, the company is not related to development of recently added RTSS plugins like HotkeyHandler/OverlayEditor, which are also fully hobby inspired. So with or without MSI, RTSS will be alive and get future updates and support.
Talking about Afterburner part, I see no sense to try to make it profitable if company decided to freeze the licensing. So if it is dead – let it be so.

If the war in Ukraine continues, the development of MSI Afterburner will end. As it stands, the project’s development has already stagnated, and its only a matter of time before Unwinder is forced to move onto other projects.  

You can join the discussion on MSI Afterburner’s development on the OC3D Forums.