The Italian police bust involves the intellectual property of many companies, and the loot seized from a retro video game counterfeiting gang is quite a haul.
According to the Video Game History Foundation’s 2023 survey, only 13% of games released before 2010 can be legally purchased. The older a title is, the less likely it is to be commercially available in any form. For this reason, emulation consoles are a big hit, as they have a large number of illegally placed games that can be conveniently accessed in one place. Most of them are on the platform without a license, so they are unlicensed products and therefore counterfeit.
The AFP news agency reported that a “pirate gang” was caught red-handed in Turin, Italy, in mid-September. Alessandro Langella, the Turin financial police officer in charge of the economic crimes unit, said authorities had seized some 12,000 consoles containing a total of 47 million pirated video games. All of them had been imported from China to be sold in online shops and stores specializing in retro games. The total value of the seized hardware was €47.5 million (or $52.6 million), although we don’t know exactly how this was calculated…
The recently seized hardware had an average of 4,000 games per unit. Consoles are typically purchased for less than $100 and contain up to 10,000 games. So the 12,000 consoles seized could only have caused millions of dollars in damage. The seized consoles have already been destroyed, and nine Italian citizens have been arrested for trafficking in counterfeit goods and could face up to eight years in prison.
Another problem with the seized consoles was that they were fitted with non-certified electrical circuits and batteries that did not comply with EU safety or technical standards. Atari, Nintendo, SEGA, Street Fighter, Super Mario, Star Wars – products from these IPs and companies were found on the pirated hardware…
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