Summary
Over the past several years, retro gaming has experienced a massive popularity boost, with older gamers looking to recapture the nostalgia of their childhoods and younger gamers looking to experience seminal consoles and titles of days past. That boom in popularity has led to games and consoles skyrocketing in price on the second-hand market, particularly titles that were short prints or relatively niche.
That said, a new development in the retro gaming market has fans worried about its short-and-long-term consequences.
Counterfeits Are Spreading Rapidly
As first spotted on Twitter by a retro gaming enthusiast, a surge of counterfeitPlayStation 1games have made their way ontoAliExpress, an online retail company based in China popular for drop-shipping various goods.
The counterfeits are significantly cheaper than what actual legitimate copies are going for, and to the untrained eye, could be passed off as real.
Taking a look at the AliExpress website, The Gamer can confirm that there are several PS1 replicas being sold. For instance,Silent Hill can be purchased for $11.76, which is far lowerthan the game’s estimated complete price of $187.55.
The same can be said for other titles, likePersona 2orBreath of Fire, which are all selling for astonishingly low prices. It appears that the PlayStation branding is being blacked out on the listings to prevent any sort of takedown, though we cannot verify if a purchased copy has that branding.
Still, it appears that a lot of concern is being levied against the discs themselves because they are eerily similar to real ones, and would-be bad actors could seemingly purchase these games en masse and pass off the discs as legitimate, loose copies, which still fetch a fair price.
Fake copies of games aren’t necessarily a new phenomenon, though they had been previously largely limited to cartridges. Any sort of shift to fake discs could shake up a market that is already contending with inflated prices and scarcity.
