Hardcore gamers are all winners, by nature. They spend ridiculous amounts of money on graphic cards, motherboards and other peripherals for that single explicit purpose. To them, winning is everything, and landing in second place is unacceptable. And it’s more than likely that if you ask them what brand they prefer when it comes to pure performance and hardcore gaming, their answers are going to be ROG. The Asus ROG line is aimed purely at hardcore gamers who demand the very best, and we were fortunate enough to sit down with ASUS Vice President and GM of Worldwide Sales, Jackie Hsu to talk about the brand, and their passion for gaming.
Asus’ ROG line has been expanding ever since its launch. Why do you think the ROG brand has grown so much?
That’s because ROG was created from customer feedback. Gamers and users have a high recognition of ROG brand. Whenever there’s a product that has the ROG logo and branding, people automatically know that product is designed and customized for gamers. Every product that has an ROG logo will have the ROG spirit that allows gamers to win.
How do you create products for the ROG line? Can you take us through the process?
In order to gain a deeper understanding of the demands of users, we use a variety of processes. One is that we join game activities. Another one is our own gamers – we have a lot of PC gamers in Asus, and a lot of them in the product management team and our R&D team are hardcore PC gamers. The third one is the gaming community where we get feedback from power users. Most of the times we also conduct focus groups to get feedback from them to understand what their real demands are. The feedback from the gaming community is extremely valuable to us.
The aside from the obvious products like motherboards and video cards, the ROG line also has peripherals like the ROG branded mouse and headphones. Any plans to introduce a keyboard, you know, to complete the set?
We don’t want to deliver just a logo on a product, you know? When we create products we always ask ourselves: will that product help you to win? We actually have an ROG committee, and this committee judges a product if it’s worthy of the ROG logo. If it helps people win, it gets that logo.