ASUS Republic of Gamers is stepping up its focus on Kenya’s gaming and digital-creation market, using Nairobi’s Otamatsuri 2026 to put high-performance hardware in front of a growing community of gamers, artists, animators and developers.
The ASUS ROG brand was the official technology partner for the second edition of Otamatsuri, an anime and manga convention held Saturday at the Carnivore Grounds in Nairobi. The event brought together communities around Japanese and Korean pop culture, including gaming, cosplay and music.
ASUS said more than 4,000 people attended the event, giving the company an opportunity to position its gaming hardware beyond traditional PC gaming and toward a broader creative economy.
At its experiential booth, attendees tested gaming laptops, handheld devices and other hardware designed for demanding workloads. The company targeted users whose computing needs increasingly overlap across gaming, video production, animation, graphic design and software development.
The push comes as AI is becoming another consideration in the purchase of premium computers. ASUS showcased Copilot+ PCs equipped with dedicated Neural Processing Units, or NPUs, which are designed to handle certain AI workloads locally rather than relying entirely on cloud computing.
For Kenyan creators, that could translate into faster AI-assisted workflows in supported applications, while reducing the need to send every task to remote servers. For ASUS, the broader opportunity is to sell high-performance machines as productivity and creative tools rather than products aimed only at gamers.
The company also demonstrated its latest ROG hardware, including the ROG Strix SCAR 18 G835, ROG Ally, ASUS TUF Gaming A15 and TUF Gaming F16.
The G835 designation refers to the 2026 ROG Strix SCAR 18, ASUS’s flagship 18-inch gaming laptop. The machine is positioned for demanding gaming as well as workloads such as content creation, multimedia editing, game development and AI applications.
The event also highlighted the challenge facing premium hardware brands in markets such as Kenya: convincing consumers that expensive devices offer value beyond specifications.
ASUS used the event to engage consumers around technical support, durability and product longevity, including its Perfect Warranty service, which provides localized protection against certain accidental damage.
That after-sales proposition could become increasingly important as more Kenyan consumers and businesses invest in higher-priced laptops for professional creative work. Hardware failures can represent more than a repair bill for freelancers and creators whose income depends on having a functioning workstation.
The company’s local distribution strategy is also becoming more important as the gaming and creator markets develop. The ROG and ASUS models showcased at Otamatsuri are available in Kenya through authorized retail partners Elevetus Technologies and Anisuma.
Otamatsuri itself illustrates the size of the audience technology companies are beginning to pursue. The 2026 convention was a full-day event at the Carnivore Grounds featuring anime, manga, cosplay, gaming and other elements of Japanese and Korean pop culture.
For ASUS, the opportunity extends beyond selling gaming machines. Kenya’s emerging creator economy needs computers capable of handling increasingly sophisticated workloads, while gamers represent a highly engaged technology audience that is often among the first to adopt higher-performance hardware.
By putting its products directly in front of those communities, ASUS is betting that the next generation of Kenyan PC buyers will see gaming hardware not simply as entertainment equipment, but as a platform for creating, developing and earning online.