ASUS brings ROG gaming laptops and handhelds to Nairobi's Otamatsuri 2026

ASUS Republic of Gamers used Nairobi's Otamatsuri 2026 to put a different spin on the gaming laptop, showing how the same machines can handle everything from gaming to video editing, animation, design and coding. ROG served as official technology partner for the second edition of Otamatsuri, an anime and manga convention held Saturday at the Carnivore Grounds. The event pulled in more than 4,000 attendees across gaming, cosplay and music built around Japanese and Korean pop culture, giving ASUS a crowd well outside the usual PC gaming audience to set up in front of.

At its booth, attendees got hands-on time with gaming laptops and handhelds built for heavy workloads. The company showed four ROG and TUF models: the ROG Strix SCAR 18 (the 2026 G835 flagship), the ROG Ally handheld, the TUF Gaming A15 and the TUF Gaming F16. The Strix SCAR 18 in particular was positioned less as a gaming rig and more as a machine for content creation, game development and AI work, which is where ASUS's real pitch at the event sat.

ASUS also showcased its Copilot+ PC lineup, laptops with dedicated Neural Processing Units built to run certain AI workloads locally instead of routing everything through the cloud. For a Kenyan animator or developer working with patchy or metered internet, that local processing matters in a way it might not for a buyer in a market with cheap, reliable bandwidth. It's a genuine technical difference, and one ASUS is clearly hoping doubles as a sales argument.

Otamatsuri also exposed the actual obstacle ASUS is working against in Kenya: getting buyers to see a premium laptop as worth the price beyond its spec sheet. The company leaned on its Perfect Warranty programme, which covers certain accidental damage locally, and pushed conversations about durability and after-sales support alongside the hardware demos. For freelancers and creators whose income depends on one working machine, a cracked screen means lost income until the fix comes through, on top of whatever the repair itself costs. That's the argument ASUS needs Kenyan buyers to internalize before spec comparisons matter much at all.

Distribution backs the pitch up locally. The ROG and ASUS models shown at Otamatsuri are sold in Kenya through Elevetus Technologies and Anisuma, ASUS's authorized retail partners.

What ASUS is really testing is whether Kenya's gaming crowd and its creator economy are close enough to be marketed to as one group. Gamers tend to adopt higher-performance hardware early and talk about it loudly, which makes them useful proof points. Creators, meanwhile, are the ones actually generating recurring revenue that could justify the machine's price over years rather than one purchase. If ASUS is right that those two audiences overlap as much in Nairobi as they do in more mature markets, Otamatsuri was cheap market research. If it's wrong, the company just spent a Saturday selling gaming hardware to people who already wanted it.