The ROG Xbox Ally X, despite having a very awkward name, is a very impressive machine. Our Dave likes it very much, but found the major sticking point to be the massively high $1,000 price tag—and it’s not like the non-X variant is particularly cheap either, at $600.

Speaking to Variety, Xbox president Sarah Bond says that you can blame Asus for that one, as the pricing was based on its feedback.

“We looked at, how do we create multiple options for people? And it really was Asus, because this is their hardware,” said Bond. "That is all of their insight into the market, into the feature set, into what people want, to determine the ultimate prices of the devices.

“I feel really good about the value that we’re giving gamers for the price, based off the reception to the hardware.”

It’s been well-received by reviewers overall, that’s for sure. And according to Bond, the pre-order response was pretty impressive, too: “We sold out of the Xbox Store. We sold really quickly at a number of other places around the world.”

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The Xbox president seems pleased as punch at the reception to its first major foray into the handheld gaming world, calling its impressive pre-order sales figures, “a real confirmation of something that we know and have been working towards for a really long time, which is gaming should act like entertainment.”

“It should be something you can have with you anywhere,” they continue. “You should be able to play any game you want with anyone you want on any device.”

Well yes, handheld gaming PCs are a very good thing indeed, and as much as Microsoft likes to claim in its advertising that “this is an Xbox”, we found the ROG Ally X to be, well… a handheld gaming PC, albeit one wearing an Xbox UI.

And as for that pricing? It seems MS is keen to point the finger at Asus, likely because it’s a bit of an eye-watering figure and otherwise it’s entirely responsible for pricing up the most expensive Xbox console of all time, all on its own.

And it must be said, the regular Asus ROG Ally X (featuring the older AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme APU, rather than the Z2 found in the Xbox model) isn’t exactly cheap, retailing at around $800, and we found the ROG Xbox Ally X to be significantly faster in the gaming benchmarks.

In fact, it’s the fastest handheld gaming PC we’ve tested to date. So, you’re getting significantly more performance if you stump up for the Xbox model over just about anything else on the market right now. And handles. We can’t forget about the handles.

But it does make me wonder how much the Xbox branding contributed to the end price, even if Asus was in the driving seat. After all, while Asus is hardly a small player in the tech world, slapping an Xbox badge on the device (along with those handles, natch) must have factored into the pricing decision somewhere, as it’s a hugely-recognisable brand that’ll likely draw far more attention than the latest Asus handheld gaming PC.

And how all this works in terms of licensing agreements, we may never truly know. However, we do know that the ROG Xbox Ally X has a silly name, is a very good portable gaming machine, and that it’s expensive.

“This is an Xbox”, eh? Nah, it seems like the more we look at it, the more it’s an Asus machine—at least in most of the ways that matter.

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