Highly popular hardware monitoring and overclocking utility MSI Afterburner could be on its last legs. The tool is free and is generally extremely useful for light tweaking, so much so that many people tend to prefer it over the first-party tools themselves. However, the project could be slowly dying a painful death.
On the Guru3D forum, the developer of the tool, Unwinder, revealed that it is "probably dead" and "semi abandoned". The reason is the lack of funding, a consequence of the war-torn situation and the author of the tool seems pretty disheartened at how things have been.
Unwinder writes:
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.
Here is a screenshot of the thread:
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When inquired about the situation, an MSI representative provided the following statement to Wccftech. From MSI"s response, it looks like there is still light at the end of the tunnel and one would hope so as Afterburner is a software utility loved by many.
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.
As a result of this, there have been several impersonation attempts by threat actors who disguise malicious websites as MSI Afterburner download sites. Here is the real MSI Afterburner download page.