Popular overclocking app MSI Afterburner is dropped for non-payment

The developer responsible for the software claims that MSI has not fulfilled the license agreement for nearly a year

Quite famous among fans of the overclocking and PC gamers as a whole, the MSI Afterburner tool may have its days numbered. That’s because, while MSI continues to keep the software website up and running, it suspended payments to the developer responsible for the update nearly a year ago.

Despite having the name of the hardware manufacturer, in practice the application is the creation and responsibility of the Russian developer Alexey Nicolaychuk, also known as “Unwinder”. In the Guru3D website forums, he explained that since the war between Russia and Ukraine started, MSI has stopped paying him for “political reasons“while remaining active in the Russian market.

Unwinder explains it the situation led to the MSI Afterburner being “semi-abandoned” for the company, which has failed to honor its licensing agreement since the start of the conflict. “I’ve been trying to keep doing my duties and working on the project myself for the past 11 months, but the result has only been disappointment.”, explained the developer.

MSI “no longer needs” the software

The creator of the software also claims this you feel more and more that you are wasting effort on software that is not rated by MSI and which she “no longer needs”. “Either way, I’ll keep trying to self-sustain it as long as I have some free time, but I’ll probably have to put it aside and move on to something else that will allow me to pay the bills.,” Unwinder said.

A sort of spiritual successor to the RivaTuner, Afterburner is famous for providing complete information and being compatible with different brands of GPUs. Currently, several companies have their own overclocking and performance monitoring software, and even MSI has even bet on something like this with its MSI Center, which may explain the lack of interest in supporting the most well-known app.

The afterburner is so popular that it has motivated several hacking campaignswhich he created fake pages to deliver tainted versions of it. While the application target remains open, Unwinder says it will continue to update RivaTuner Static Serverwhich is not affected by the sanctions imposed on the Russian software and hardware market in recent months.