MSI Afterburner faces shutdown due to lack of funds

Recently, it has been reported that MSI Afterburner, the highly acclaimed video card overclocking software, may stop maintenance updates. Its developer said that since MSI has stopped fulfilling its obligations under the MSI Afterburner license agreement, it will only continue to maintain it when it is free, and it is in a half-abandoned state. In the future, it may even choose to give up completely and turn to other projects.

The developer explained on the Guru3D forum that the reason is that the war between Russia and Ukraine resulted in a lack of sufficient funds, forcing the entire MSI Afterburner project to stagnate for nearly a year. Without the support of MSI’s hardware and software resources, it is impossible to invest more energy and continue to update and improve the software.

MSI Afterburner

PC Gamer got a statement from MSI confirming that MSI will continue to use MSI Afterburner, has been working hard on a solution and hopes that the issue will be resolved soon. Additionally, MSI representatives told Wccftech that its product marketing and accounting teams are working on the issue, that due to the war, MSI payments could not be transferred to the developer’s bank account, and that the two parties have been in touch to figure out how to resolve the issue.

MSI Afterburner is the first software that many players think of when discussing GPU overclocking. It has been widely used by gamers and overclocking enthusiasts for more than ten years. Due to the success of MSI’s software, many peers have developed similar software. The last stable version of MSI Afterburner was released in December 2021. The lack of updates for a long time also gives criminals an opportunity to pretend to be an official phishing website to provide downloads, which leads to security risks.