Asus says they will unlock my bootloader for ...money.

I was expecting something like $15 to deter script kiddies that are following outdated/misleading/incomplete YouTube flashing tutorials and will end with a brick but $200????

It's a giant "FUCK YOU" to the paying customer. If it was me, I'd flip the phone on eBay and never ever buy anything from Asus anymore

Yeah, $200 is like the price of a fully functioning entry level samsung A15/16 series smartphone which would get 5-6 years of updates! This is ridiculous. Being a niche brand and pulling these stunts is stupid.
- You can get a middle class phone for this money. That's what I paid for my current phone and it's just missing the AAA camera.

What the actual fuck.

I think after all the bad press they got with the gamernexus warranty mess, it might be something to point them out to.

ASUS rubs their nipples while repeating "we're sorry..." and changing absolutely nothing but people keep buying their shit anyway...so they never will.

Been hearing lots of bad things about Asus, especially the whole Gamers Nexus thing

Probably because no one here cares about ASUS. It was only relevant because the Zenfone line was small. As soon as that returned to a normal (massive) form factor, any reason to buy an ASUS phone disappeared.

It isn't just about one company, but precedent. If today Asus can get away with this, other will look and copy the behavior. Apple and Samsung started a lot of anti-consumer precedents and no one can sure Asus isn't the next.
- No one is copying ASUS, they are an irrelevant company with a tiny market share.
- Name and shame everywhere you can, leave comments, reviews everywhere, make sure they know how pissed you are. If you're within the return window I'd say just return it with that reason.
And they have a jack. And I think they had the phone with the single camera right? I don't need a front one. That was a cool feature.

Damn some 15 years ago I loved Asus hardware but so much crap has surfaced in recent years.
I don't know if they were always scum or they sold out/enshittified.

A little of both, but I think it's mostly enshittification. I've had nothing but trouble with Asus, to the point where I don't buy their products anymore and try to persuade others to avoid them.

not even Google prevents you from unlocking the bootloader on their phones so why are these Manufacturers doing this? what's their reasoning behind this ?

not even Google

Google are one of the best manufacturers for this, they have always supported and provided instructions for unlocking as far as I can remember
"Security"
Xiaomi's reasoning was they produce different phones for Chinese internal and for global market. A lot of scalpers bought the Chinese version, took it outside China, flashed a global rom and sold it. Chinese versions have limited frequency support and sometimes different chipsets, the problem was buyers of these phones nagged to Xiaomi's support and left bad reviews, even though it wasn't Xiaomi's fault.

Yes, it sounds bullshit, I'm just illustrating, that if you ask companies for reasons, they can tell you some similar stories.

The good part, is that bootloader opening workflow was not the best, but at least acceptable for me compared to Asus'. You had to register your IMEI with a Xiaomi account, than wait a week and you could open it (This was the workflow like 5 years ago, and I still have the same phone, I don't know if they changed it). This way they could slow down the scalpers, and they could see if someone want to mass open a lot of phones at the same time.

This is borderline extortion, for a feature that should have been available at launch without any requests needed

That's the worst part, it was offered at launch and it was very easy: simple APK install and the click of a button! But suddenly they decided to remove it without any prior warning, and now, after a year or two of promises of BL unlock coming back "in a few months", they simply said fuck you

Sad to see this hasn't improved. I really wanted a zenphone 10, was my ideal set of hardware but when it released was around the time the unlock tool went away and they said month after month that "next month the new version would be out". Sad since the phone doesn't have the best update support to begin with so wanted something I could unlock.

Guess I'll have to avoid ASUS products if they're willing to fuck over customers like this

I lost my respect for Asus when I had a Zenwatch 2 (I still have it), and they promised at the time Android Wear 2.0 in front our faces for months promising it would be released, but refused to even give an estimated time of release to OTA. This was well after WearOS 2 was released. Their online forum staff members were rude sometimes about it and other times, never responded to passionate asks about when it would be made available. The fact that they didn't reply and care about giving any updates or indication at the time, was enough to push me far away from them.

Looks like another job for Gamers Nexus

I had a similarly nightmarish experience with Asus over their phone some years ago. I was a long time Asus fan in the PC sphere, now none of my tech is ASUS.

Even trying to buy anything from them directly is damn near impossible. Tried purchasing a desktop from their website a few weeks back, and the system wouldn't accept my address as valid. I talked to their support team, they told me they have to escalate it and I'd hear back in 24-48 hours.

Never heard back. Ended up going through Lenovo, and that was painless.

I used to almost exclusively recommend Asus or Lenovo to my family and friends, but I guess its just Lenovo now.

Well they lost a customer with recommendations to other possible customers... you're not the loser here