Hardware manufacturers removing game branding from AMD products?

If you have been following the recent GPP discussion, you might have noticed some new chatter on the web about yesterday’s Gigabyte release, their new RX 580 Gaming Box was released just as that, the "Gigabyte RX 580 Gaming Box", while the other two Nvidia versions are listed under the Aorus branding.

That was noticed by a number of users throughout the web, and raised a flag or two, could it have anything to do with the GPP discussion from Nvidia? E.g. separating and segmentation of brands, as Nvidia would require exclusivity from partners that sign up for the program. Earlier reports indicated NVIDIA’s condition for allowing partners into the GPP was that they exclusively reserve their gaming brands for GeForce cards, or else they couldn’t participate. Some users now have noticed that small changes are taking effect. Now let me write this in shouty words, it is NOT CONFIRMED, but Gigabyte MIGHT be separating Radeon cards to the Gigabyte brand and moving Nvidia cards into their separate Aorus brand, again unconfirmed as their website still shows both as an option.

It was also rumored that ASUS STRIX cards would not be available for Radeon products, in the USA there indeed seems to be low stock, likely (and I assume this) resulting in the products indeed not listed. However here in the EU, I can see full availability for anything Radeon branded with ROG / STRIX, the ASUS website shows everything to be normal, so we cannot see any changes taking effect on the ASUS side at this moment. So again, I am not seeing anything alarming.

For MSI there is something noticeable, the Radeon Gaming X series graphics cards are no longer listed on the global and EU websites, the USA website, however, is listing all cards as normal. So that is the one oddity I have found.

All three brands show volume availability here in the EU under all brands, Gaming X, Aorus and ROG STRIX. There is one more observation, at this time I am not certain if the ‘re-branding’ actually is in effect or if it is a result of a lot of speculation, however website ComputerBase received a communication from Gigabyte Europe as to why the RX 580 Gaming box did not carry AORUS branding as one would expect.

 “The manufacturer states that the product is not gamer focused. This, however, is inconsistent with the product page, whose headings are ‘Turn Your Ultrabook to Gaming Platform’ and ‘Upgrade the Game Experience’.”

That reply is indeed a bit weird, a Radeon RX 580 is not considered to be a gaming product? We’ll follow this closely, but at this time we’ll need more facts and thus visually see noticeable branding changes to see if GPP partners are actually actively rebranding their products. The proof this far as mentioned on several forums and websites is just too thin. This could very simply be Gigabyte reorganizing, as they have been doing for many months now. I also do wonder, if this GPP discussion would not have surfaced on the web, would anyone even have noticed this? But small subtle changes like these do feed the speculation on the bigger social discussion platforms, often for valid reasons & reasoning.

Asus Radeon RX 580 STRIX edition with 8GB GDDR5 memory