MSI Afterburner is one of the most used graphics card utility and has been a mainstay in the overclocking performance tweaking scene for a very long time. Usable for both AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards, the software also supports the newly released RTX 40 cards as well as Radeon RX 7000 but despite that recent support, MSI’s Afterburner developer, Unwinder, says that he has not been paid for developing the software.
Afterburner’s developer Alexey Nicolayachuk aka Unwinder states in a community post that further development on MSI Afterburner is now being halted due to the lack of payments from MSI resulting from the war between Russia and Ukraine. The global community has put sanctions on Russia which has halted operations for many companies including PC manufacturers such as MSI. This has made sending payment to Unwinder difficult and MSI has not resolved payments for 2022.
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.
– Alexey “Unwinder” Nicolayachuk, Afterburner developer
Afterburner has a partner software, Rivatuner Statistics Server or RTSS which is also developed by Unwinder and is also a common tool used by graphics card and performance monitoring utilities to overlay graphics card information on screen. This is used by the tech media, streamers, video creators and more.
On reaching out to MSI, WCCFtech’s Hassan Mujtaba received the following response:
Got an update from MSI regarding this:
"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" https://t.co/zj0Ph2SDuk
— Hassan Mujtaba (@hms1193) January 9, 2023
As already stated by Unwinder, MSI has been unable to due to the war. TechPowerUp’s report on the news states that there are several other ways to make the payment including settling thru independent regional operations like MSI India which home country of India remains active in their relation with Russia.
