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Has NZXT always been this shady? I bought a PC from them like 5 years ago and it's been going strong since the start. I'm sure as hell never buying one again, that's for sure.
I think they became more shady after the investment from Francisco Partners, who are likely trying to squeeze more value from the company. I think Gamers Nexus mentioned this in the previous video.
That investment occurred Dec 2021, just to give frame of reference.
Hmm, not too long before the board catching fire issue...
Francisco Partners ran my previous employer into the ground with a lot of shady shit too. Not surprised to hear their name involved with this.
Private equity swooped in and started the enshittification process as quickly as possible.
They used to have a good reputation, at least a few years ago. Their stuff was a decent value. I don't know what it's like now, but it seems more like terrible business practices rather than poor quality products are the issue.
Yup, and Steve said as much in the original video. They said they'll continue to review NZXT products because they're generally pretty good (except the RGB fan thing that caught on fire), but they refuse to accept sponsorship money because they don't want to be associated with them.
This is the second major issue from them, and the way they handled it is exactly the same: deny the problem until they're forced to, and then do the bare minimum to fix it.
He alluded to it in the first video, and I think it's spot on.
They ended up with an "inventory problem". Which is to say, some business major in the company somewhere, or a consultant or whatever saw that they were spending money to store it all, and said "A company's assets should never cost money, they should MAKE money" or some such business speak. Ultimately that translated into every layer of the business being instructed to prioritize using that that old inventory, somehow, or pushing it to customers.
"People don't really want to buy all this older hardware off of us, but we can convince people who don't know any better to rent it."
"We don't have enough 4090s to keep up with demand for these high-end rentals, but we're sure as hell not buying more when we have all these perfectly-good 4080s lying around."
It’s hard to say. They put out some great stuff that filled some genuine gaps in the market… then the whole thing with the one case happened. It’s very possible they’ve always been shady creeps and we just didn’t notice right away.
I bought a kraken 240 a few years ago, since it was one of, if not the only 240mm aio cooler available at the time. A genuine gap in the market.
Then I learned that its pump speed is not set by the motherboard, but via usb and a proprietary (and infamously buggy and resource hoggy) windows app. At startup it is set to a default slow pump speed, and will not speed up unless you have their application bloatware running. On linux youre just fucked.
I will not be buying NZXT again.