Celery you're dead on right, but you know, I have to ask... is being paranoid a bad thing? I never saw bootleg games (other than obvious asian pirates and multicarts) up until I started flea shopping and doing my 4yr run at NA either. But as they started to pop up more, and the quality went from trash to excellent I saw both the good and bad reactions of people to it. In the end, personally I think it's great! We need more paranoia.

For so long people were playing it like it was small town 1950s america where you trust always blindly as that one general store would never rip you off. If people are going to create a system where games get puffed up to bloated prices where making high quality like for like looking external copies with internal boards that last and are well made is a result the paranoia is deserved but also very warranted. Had the system not got all hipster and scalper hot increasingly so in the last five years it would be a radically different picture now, stuff like the n64 dupes, the near perfect GBA copies, and the rest wouldn't be a thing and everyone wouldn't need a game bit unless they needed to really clean or service a cart or system.

Think of it this way, with that N64 bootleg I brought up, in particular Bomberman 64 Second Attack. 2010 that game was a $30-35 title average(so less was easily done and 12mo ago was still $50) and currently it sells 5 years later at $135-145 average priced. The bootleg which is indistinguishable on the outside is $67 from aliexpress. Even if we were to assume that 1/2 the price of that game were parts, manufacturing and assembly it's still a $35~ game for the pirate company to make. They wouldn't even bother. The stuff you'd see bootlegged would only be the mostly obscenely popular junk like Pokemon games where they make little on it due to parts and process, but because they can flip so many the cash is there. Here's one cinemassacre ruined -- Hagane, 2010 it was a $35 game, now it's $450~. Run Saber SNES went from a $5 to $50 game after being in a video in 2012 along side Hagane.


Odds are it may suppress but I doubt it'll drive down the expensive games much. It could lessen the desire for them, but those who just want to blow $100 or $1000 on a legit game will still do it, this won't dissuade them. But for those who want a single physical cart on a system and can't or don't want to pay $100 or $1000 for it would be happy to blow $20-50 on a solid copy. They get what they need, and the collector gets what they want too with less people fishing in the same pond. The only hang up (or not) would be the paranoia wanting to see the board before buying which if someone is blowing 3 to 4 figures on a game, they damn well should be doing it anyways. You don't buy a car without a test drive, and sure they're far more expensive and useful than a game but it's the principle of the matter. You know?

The way I look at it is how I look at off the rack clone consoles now. Sure you could pay $50 for a resold beat up NES system, or you could blow the same that also runs SNES and Genesis or less for a single and lots of people buy them as they keep popping up in more retail spaces. There's a market there. It's not like the Retrons and Retrobits or even crappy Yobos have harmed the value of a legit old system, they have a place, just along side of clone carts.