Italy busts ring trafficking retro video games from China
Italy busts ring trafficking retro video games from China
Italy's financial police said Friday they have dismantled a ring trafficking counterfeit vintage video game consoles from China containing some of the most popular titles of the 1980s and 90s."These games featured well-known characters from the world of video games from the 1980s and 1990s, all prot...
Not much info here but I wonder if these were some sort of fake NES/SNES/Mega Drive minis or just handheld emulation devices in general
I was wondering if shipping SD cards full of ROMs would ever come to bite the manufacturers in the ass and I guess it might have. Will this be a one-off thing or a sign of a wider EU crackdown? I think there was a warning earlier issued by some agency this month about how the solder in one of the Anbernic devices exceeded EU's maximum lead levels
Edit: There's a video of the Italian cops' raid on the warehouse where the devices were being held, looks like a large variety of different devices
12,000 consoles … for an estimated value of more than 47.5 million euros.
Each console costs 40 grand?
It's hilarious when they apply the same math they use to calculate the worth of drug busts to something like this
Software licensing. For games you literally can't buy anymore in most cases.
They probably have 1000 games on each console that you can select from in a list and they're pricing based on that. Ridiculous.
Black Book of Cummunism-ass "math"
Around 12,000 consoles with 47 million games
No. That is incorrect. Each console had a few thousand games, and you did bullshit math to make that sound worse. Each copy of a rom does not count as an individual video game, that’s an insane way to measure things.
But what about those Famicom cassettes on which it is written "9999999 games in 1!"?
Italy still mad that China has evidence of inventing noodles first
...yet people still call it noodles instead of 面/miàn 😭
Iirc remains of fast food bars which most likely served noodles were found even in ancient Troy, ancient Rome definitely had those too, but the Italians went backward so much they even have a legend that Marco Polo brought noodles from China. In reality noodles in Italia most likely appeared by the same route as everything else in antiquity, from Greeks (often with Etruscan middlemanning).
What is the charge?
Enjoying a game? Enjoying a succulent Chinese retro game?
The most diabolical of crimes: copyright infringement
Why crack down on people traffickers when you can take down some video game smugglers instead
People aren't eating counterfeit Sega Saturns before they board a plane from China, some Italians were presumably just ordering retro emulation devices in bulk from China
Anbernic is fine. They don't directly ship roms on cards. They probably got a bunch of those cheap ESP32 8bit devices that come loaded with every NES game. Fuck Italy and fuck IP law. I'm not a Chomsky fan but he is right about IP. It's a tool used to supress industry in the global south.
I'm sure the wealthy kulaks that hoard retro video games and sell them at collector prices will be pleased.
"Don Cicio! The bootleg game consoles have been seized by la carabinieri!"
Mario sleeps with the fishes.
Nice!
Braver than the troops
Real Gs buy chinese flashcarts and fill them with ROMs themselves 🫡
Finding retro hardware for cheap at flohmarkts has only gotten harder and harder with each year :sadness:
thank god! i don't know how many nights of sleep have been lost over that whole fiasco. the amount of profits that some non-existing companies probably could have missed out on is unthinkable
I wonder if these were some sort of fake NES/SNES/Mega Drive minis or just handheld emulation devices in general
the most common ones i've seen are
1: game boy that is actually an NES emulator with 999 games on it (with a usb port you can plug a fake NES controller into and play 2P)
and 2: the bar/coffee shop version which is a small arcade machine with two sticks and two buttons and is usually an NES or SNES emulator with a game selection screen. this one sometimes has qr codes to scan and pay with weixin/alipay before you can play
The Anbernic/Retroid/etc generic emulation devices should be completely safe if they dropped the bundled roms, but on the other hand I suspect those sd cards are a big reason why the devices sell in the first place
first they came for the Gamers...
Lmao what a waste of resources for emulators
Real Rebels of the Neon God moment