Alexey “Unwinder” Nicolaychuk, a Russia-based developer who developed the MSI Afterburner software, states that the project is “probably dead” and “semi abandoned”, as MSI has stopped “performing their obligations under the Afterburner license agreement” due to political reasons even though it remained active in the Russian market. He claims that the Taiwanese hardware company MSI has not fulfilled its licensing agreement for almost a year. Alexey who is responsible for updating the software’s website and keeping it up and running claims that he hasn’t received a payment from MSI for almost 11 months now, citing the sanctions imposed on Russia for invading Ukraine. As a result, the Afterburner project is now supported by Alexey only during his free time. However, he will probably need to drop the project for something else so that it can help him pay his bills. “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,” he added. Alexey explains the current situation of the MSI Afterburner project in a post on the Guru3D forum, which says: No need to be that impatient. It just demotivates to do anything and MSI afterburner project is probably dead. 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. Despite Alexey’s grim assessment, MSI, on the other hand, says it intends to continue developing the Afterburner software and has been working on a solution, and expects it to be resolved “soon.” “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,” an MSI representative told Wccftech in a statement. Meanwhile, the good news is that another hobby project developed by Alexey called “RTSS” (the popular RivaTuner Statistic Server), a frame rate monitoring tool and Afterburner’s hardware monitoring backend continues to remain active and unaffected by the sanctions imposed on the Russian software and hardware market in recent months, as it is not an MSI tool. “It is separate and fully hobbyist application created many years before MSI Afterburner was even born. So with or without MSI, RTSS will be alive and get future updates and support,” he wrote.
