Soulja Boy Is Selling Cheap Emulators as His Own Consoles | Hacker News Reader

Soulja Boy Is Selling Cheap Emulators as His Own Consoles

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128 pointsmises113 comments

The article handily links to the Alibaba store: https://www.aliexpress.com/store/3850034

I suspect what happened is that someone approached him with the idea of putting his brand on it, and he was flattered; otherwise it's basically the Amazon drop shipping business.

Yeah, to me he seems like the gullible victim here. In addition to anyone who buys it, I suppose.

Except he's probably getting paid...

What makes you think he isn’t just interested in video games, discovered emulators and liked the product and saw that it wasn’t being marketed to his audience?

Are you familiar with the ways musicians, particularly in hip hop, diversify their business portfolios by selling product lines?

Are you familiar with Fenty, Beats by Dre, etc?

Yes, but those ranges have a high level of personal involvement and brand coherency, and are generally better quality. This is a lot more of a cheap opportunistic item.

So their marketing had its intended effects on you

The difference is that those products are actually new things created for those brands, and are (relatively) high quality. This is a cheap emulator box being drop shipped from Aliexpress that already existed before Soulja Boi slapped his name on it. (Not to mention that it's almost certainly violating copyright laws with all the roms bundled with it).

IIRC, Beats are also just rebranded Chinese headphones. You can buy them direct from China for half the price (but without that lowercase "b" on 'em).

Besides the blatant copyright infringement, I ain't seeing how this is any worse.

Apple isn’t going to risk their brand by rebranding cheap Chinese crap, they have nothing to gain from that. It’s much more likely they designed headphones and the Chinese factories made cheap clones.

Apple acquired Beats in 2014. Beats existed - and sold overpriced headphones - for 6 years prior.

Headphones made in partnership with Monster which is hardly ‘cheap Chinese crap’. If anything it’s not cheap.

I never said they were cheap. I did, however, say they were Chinese, and while I can't seem to find any info online about where Monster manufactures its headphones, it's statistically probable that they're made in China (maybe not literal rebrands of existing Chinese-made headphones, though, so I'll concede that point).

Whether or not they're "crap" is subjective, but if Monster's cables are any indication, their price is likely not consistent with their quality.

They aren't. Neither were they invented by Dr. Dre. They were developed in SF, at Ammunition Group LLC.

Dont you mean the image of Beats was developed by Ammunition Group, and then slapped on Monster headphones?

Do you mean to tell me that the headphones were not personally made by Dr Dre? They partnered with Monster as unsurprising a rapper might know what he wants in headphones but doesn’t know how to actually manufacture them.

How is that different than slapping his name on a T-shirt and charging an even larger percentage markup?

One is against the law, the other isn’t.

I don’t think Soulja Boy has fans. He was basically a one hit wonder back in 2007 who couldn’t rap but had one catchy song.

Dr. Dre has been active for 30 years and produced for and rapped with a number of successful rappers including Eazy-E, Tupac, Snoop Dog, Ice Cube, 50 cent, and Eminem. To even think about putting him and Soulja Boy in the same sentence is crazy.

He's not even branding it really. He's just shipping junk from China wholesale and selling it locally, like many other people do. The only difference is that he's somewhat prominent, so he gets some free publicity out of it. That same publicity is probably going to get him into some legal trouble.

This feels like what happens to professional sports players. Very often they go from $0 to millions with no training or professional support on how to deal with 7+ zeros of wealth. They quickly attract bottom-feeders promising "crazy returns" on anything and everything. Witness the endless stream of sports star "owned" restaurants and bars that wink in and out of existence, and the recent sanctions by the SEC on ICO promotion.

The only thing I can think is I bet you he doesn't have anything copyrighted by Disney.

We really need to rethink our system where there will never be a time when games from Atari will become public domain.

reminds me of a joke: the only things you cannot draw are Mohammad and Disney characters

The Soulja watch is interesting to me. I see very similar ones coming from China, but it’s pretty amazing that at any hardware spec a “smart” watch could be sold as little as $10, let alone with profit. They’re shameless rips of Apple, but at $10 damn that’s crazy.

The really interesting part is that the highlight marketing photos are using pictures of an Apple Watch and when you actually check the product, the "real" photos is nothing like it.

This is basically adding a known brand onto cheap tech knockoff products.

Here is a video [0] of him with it on, yeah, nothing like the Apple watch. Also on the topic of cheap Chinese watches I would read the section of this article on the smartwatch [1] and note this was published 2 years ago. That whole article is interesting but the smartwatch and their contact who said it only cost them $6 to make (note they bought the watches for just under $10 each):

> If the factory sold the watches for $7.49, how much could they possibly cost to make? That’s a question that can be awfully hard to get answered. Not really expecting an answer, we asked our friend to ask his friend. She was happy to tell us: $6.

> Six dollars for: a GSM chipset, a CPU, an LCD screen, a battery, a PCB, a metal housing, a molded silicone watch band, a MicroUSB cable, and a box. And the labor to assemble and test all of that.

[0] http://www.xxlmag.com/video/2018/12/soulja-boy-watch-brand-s...

[1] https://medium.com/newco/what-50-buys-you-at-huaqiangbei-the...

Notice how none of the product photos show the other side? Must be a pretty ugly micro b port.

The insane part is, if you are an American company trying to release a smart watch, you won't be able to get your cost of goods down that low.

I worked on the Microsoft Band team, the RAM inside the Band cost almost the same as these watches cost to make all up!

Annoyingly enough, when we asked MediaTek if we could buy use their chipset, they would only sell it to us with their OS running on top. IIRC I think they were softening up on this stance later on.

Suffice to say after paying for a Western company's MCU + the RAM, the cost was already way above what these watches cost to make, add in all the other parts and, well, that is how you end up with a $200 MSRP.

On the flip side, things like a custom made light pipe to improve HR accuracy are necessary to go from "good enough" to "best in class".

> Annoyingly enough, when we asked MediaTek if we could buy use their chipset, they would only sell it to us with their OS running on top.

I hit the same thing with Freescale too. I think it's that they don't want to deal with support calls for unsupported software.

It was surreal hearing their rep tell us that the chip was specifically designed for only FreeRTOS, Linux, & WinCE and physically could not run anything else. Like, we just want to run our in house RTOS; we're quite used to having to write our own BSP.

> On the flip side, things like a custom made light pipe to improve HR accuracy are necessary to go from "good enough" to "best in class".

Totally agree/understand. I've had a little time messing with budget bin "smart watches" and they remind me a lot of the early versions of Android vs iOS where the hardware/software pairing in iOS was just such a better experience than a really cheap Android phone. The Android ticked all the same boxes on paper but typing or scrolling on both the device was a night and day difference. Note: I'm not trying to start an iOS vs Android fight, just pointing out that having the same basic capabilities (wifi, bluetooth, 3g, touch screen, etc) does not automatically put 2 products in the same category.

Reminds me of the $100 iphone x clone https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qvmkdd/counterfei...

When you see crap like that being made for $10 you should immediately think "that is made with disgusting labour". No part of you should be impressed with this. Not saying expensive branded stuff is any better, but they arent smart in making a $10 watch - they just don't have the momentum of a big brand to sell it a thousand percent markup.

TLDR; products like this are just a terrible production of waste using barely legal labour. Pay it no attention.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFwbrYCh3Oo

So has anyone tried the Chinese pirate console that he's apparently rebranding?

It looks like it's this one [1], $89 on Amazon. Emulates PS1, GBC, SNES and more, with 843 games, including classics like Super Mario Bros.

I'd absolutely love to have something like this in my living room, but I think I'd prefer a somewhat less suspect, more hacker-friendly system where one could easily add new games. But I also don't know anything about this one.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Console-Entertainment-System-Classic-...

There's lots of reviews on youtube of this kind of thing.

Have a look at RetroPie: https://retropie.org.uk/

Doesn't come with any game ROMs, but there are enough places you can download them. Once you have them, it's just a simple file transfer to install them.

Thanks. Looks like something I need a Raspberry Pi to run? I'd like something that just works out of the box, zero building or fiddling with hardware.

It doesn't involve much effort. Transfer image to SD card, put SD card into the Pi and that's pretty much about it on the hardware side.

After that you just have to transfer some game ROMs, set up your controller(s) and you should be good to go. Takes at most 20 minutes to get it all up and running the first time.

https://retropie.org.uk/docs/First-Installation/

> Takes at most 20 minutes to get it all up and running

I'm currently on about 2 hours of trying to get it working (having given up several times.) And that wasn't even configuring any exotic emulators or controllers.

Look for a bundle like this [1], the only 'buiilding' it requires is putting the Pi into the case, and plugging in the controllers and PSU. It doesn't come with RetroPie, but that's easy to put onto an SD card.

As a bonus, there are also cases like this [2] available.

[1] https://thepihut.com/collections/raspberry-pi-kits-and-bundl...

[2] https://thepihut.com/collections/raspberry-pi-store/products...

I have one. The best part is the "case" it's huge compared to the hardware inside, do it's super light.

It's like an Arduino inside a shoebox.

After the ausus EEE series became hip I tried a random cheap product which was supposed to be a media center / entertainment system. It was horribly slow, running android. Even more worrying was that they rubbed remote desktop stuff under my nose all the time. I was so scared to handle any remotely personal with it that I gave up on it after 2 sessions of messing with it.

If you don't care about the money, test you luck. But I would be very careful. At least considering security/privacy.

Off-brand game consoles with preloaded pirated games exist for a long long time. They actually make me somewhat nostalgic for early 90s, when they were ubiquitous in my country. Maybe in first-world countries (where original consoles are being officially distributed) they are exotic, but definitely not everywhere.

Ha! I have one of these that i built into a portable arcade machine. Some of the hardware has Xbox references on the pcbs, though i suspect the just didn't bother to remove from the source, though it could be surplus from earlier versions.

The games are hilarious and completely ripped off, some the Japanese only market versions, others weird mash-ups (like 8-bit Mario but with looney tunes characters).

Mine most certainly does not output 4k (what would a 4k gb-color emulator exactly look like? Gigantic, crisp pixels?)

800 preloaded games? The disregard for copyright is embarrassingly naive... usually the idea with selling something is to come out financially ahead in the end.

Best Buy has been selling pirate retro consoles for months, with no action taken against them.

https://m.bestbuy.ca/en-CA/product/300-in-1-portable-retro-m...

And, of course, Amazon and Ali Baba have been selling them for ages.

Yep, these types of Chinese preloaded consoles have been around for years now. I doubt the few thousand dollars Soulja Boy makes re-selling these will be of much interest to anyone.

My local mall had something similar for sale at a kiosk. I was shocked that nobody checks to see if what they're selling is legal. The mall is owned by Macerich a company that owns a ton of malls all over the place.

Counterfeit items aren't a new thing; these are to video games as knock-off Prada bags are to fashion.

Right, this whole thread reads like hacker news is just discovering knock-offs

It's strange to see them in "main stream" locations though

I'm sorry if my comment came off that way. I used to buy Folex watches on the street 20 years ago... so knock offs are certainly not new to me. The difference is that the sleazy guy on the street has nothing to lose while best buy, large malls, soulja boy, etc are taking a much larger risk by promoting it because they all have a lot to lose. Knock offs are not surprising -- the risk is.

The kiosk is renting from the mall owner, the mall owner has no liability about what the kiosk owner sells.

That's not being sold by Best Buy, it says "sold by CC Trading Bridge".

Regardless of what it says, that’s Best Buy’s store, Best Buy gets your money, and Best Buy gets your phone call or email if there’s a problem with the purchase. I’d call that “sold by Best Buy.”

That is certainly not the same as "sold by Best Buy". It is sold and shipped by CC Trading Bridge. IANAL, but I would suspect the fact that this is a 3rd party seller that is not even using Best Buy fulfillment centers would provide Best Buy a certain level of protection from legal ramifications. This isn't much different from EBay.

Yes, but please pay for my music ?

I'm semi-famous. Does anyone want to buy a raspberry pi running RetroArch with my name written on it? /s

Honestly though, I'm surprised we haven't seen this from well known 'celebrity' accounts on Reddit.

Celebrities on Reddit don’t have great push marketing channels. And in general overt marketing doesn’t work well on Reddit. That audience likes to be tricked into buying things via clever organic “news”.

Other sites like Instagram are much more amenable to brand marketing like this.

It’s just marketing, I don’t see what’s so strange about it. He runs a public brand, and he looks for products that he thinks can be effectively marketed through that brand.

It’s no different than Urban Outfitters.

ok.

You can charge $400 if you are famous enough https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rxCD_bMhZA https://www.retromodding.com/collections/preconfigured-build...

These are just Alibaba emulators with ROMs preloaded right? How is he expecting not to get sued by every game dev and manufacturer from the last 30 years?

because the games are all from a few devs and they get a cut. This is too obvious to be this stupid. Take a look at this guy and ask yourself how hes been so successful. Hes crazy like a fox.

But well see, maybe hes finally went crazy.

There's no way Nintendo would ever cut a deal.

Considering they already have their own Retro offering with presumably an insane markup i feel you're correct.

There is no chance of this when Sony and Nintendo are releasing their own retro mini consoles.

Perhaps he just rubber stamped the idea.

Or some suit somewhere told him it's okay.

Or he just doesn't care because he'd get a C&D first, comply and keep the profits.

> How is he expecting not to get sued by every game dev and manufacturer from the last 30 years?

Probably by being broke. Nintendo might still prosecute to make a point though.

For the same reason Prada or Gucci doesn't go after every illegal vendor selling fake merchandise on the street corner, even if you go after them and win what are you going to take? There's very little profit involved in these endeavors and most people are wise enough to be able to detect cheap junk and not buy it. Soulja Boy isn't getting rich off of this, but Nintendo might take notice if this blows up too much.

Does it play Braid tho? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSXofLK5hFQ)

I've found it interesting that knockoff SNES and NES classics are pervasive not just online these days, but and brick and mortar malls. For the unknowing parent buying for their kids, they seem like the better offer, they usually list having hundreds of games rather than the couple dozen with the legitimate consoles. At a glance, they look official, having similar styling to both the hardware and the classic Nintendo box look.

They are the better offer. Why should a parent care if some company's getting royalties for a game they released 30 years ago?

Since scarcity of IP has less meaning these days, branding and identity seem to be what's scarce and interesting. Somehow, I love this whole idea.

Consoles with a bunch of preloaded pirated games were quite common in Eastern Europe back in the 90's.

I would sincerely love to know how he got this idea. I mean, he is a renowned musician. Why would he out of nowhere sell something that reeks of piracy and can get him into problems? I fail to understand.

Guessing someone offered to do all the work if he lent his name. Probably his previous money has run out...

Rap music has a strong history of building your brand then licensing products with your name/brand on them or even to the extent of Kanye where he actually designs his own fashion line/shoes.

> even to the extent of Kanye where he actually designs his own fashion line/shoes.

There is no way he does that himself, just like all the other wannabe fashion/perfume/merchandising brands. They just use their fame to tack on another revenue stream.

Actually Kanye is quite into fashion and apparel, instead of just making assumptions about someone's capabilities because they're famous, use that energy to learn about them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanye_West#Fashion

Just because someone is famous, doesn't mean they are especially good at a job. Michael Jordan is a much better basketball player then a baseball player.

Ok but he actually has a company with products he cares about and is involved with, so whether or not the product is "good" by your judgement, it still shows that he's earnest and not trying to make a quick cash-in with minimal effort.

Kanye interned at Fendi about 12 years ago - he's definitely pretty involved in fashion beyond just lending his name

> Kanye interned at Fendi about 12 years ago

I guess that makes him an expert.

He's in politics too. Amazing man of many talents.

> I guess that makes him an expert.

No it made him a student he's passionate about fashion and wanted to learn how the industry worked from the inside, but I'd argue designing one of the most iconic men's shoes of the decade that made him an expert.

You can hate on his confidence and attitude all you like but I think it's silly to pretend he isn't responsible for his own achievements just because you don't like the guy.

The product page website was originally a vehicle for a knock-off smartwatch. Clearly he's just shamelessly pitching a drop-shippable console with some branding on it. I doubt he had any influence on its creation, and will probably just plead ignorance if the lawyers come out.

I'm shocked by how few people realize the scheme he's running. Then again, it only involved a tiny bit less effort than 99% of other celebrity-endorsed products.

> Clearly he's just shamelessly pitching a drop-shippable console with some branding on it.

Actually there's no branding on it either - it's straight drop-shipping from AliExpress.

https://www.polygon.com/2018/12/5/18127315/soulja-boy-handhe...

He has been broke for a long time. He spent all his money really fast and never really recovered. He has been caught numerous times flaunting "Motion Picture" money as if it's real.

He got the same idea from the people who convinced various "celebrities" to rep ICO's. By which I mean someone flashed a bunch of money in their direction to be a spokesperson for some drop-shipped, cheap, buggy emulator.

He's broke and a glorified scam artist at this point. Has been selling all sorts of garbage Chinese products marked up under his own "brand", as well as the scams where he offers to buy everyone products for "free" and you just pay the shipping.

https://twitter.com/souljaboy/status/814639677550362624?lang...

https://news.avclub.com/we-can-all-learn-something-from-the-...

http://www.xxlmag.com/news/2017/02/soulja-boy-sean-kingston-...

My guess is he's not broke broke -- he probably has millions in debt for assets like homes and cars and whatever else, and he's doing this to pay those off. I don't think someone who is getting paid $200 just to record themselves namedropping people is broke in the same way that someone who actually has no way to earn income is.

The fact that he couldn't come up with $675 for a car rental, and has had some other similar issues including being unable to pay his rent, leads me to beleive he's broke broke. His mother has come out claiming he is as well. He may earn $200 just to record himself, but then he goes and spends $1000 on designer clothes and poorly made jewelry. This is all hearsay of course

That second link (avclub) is a story about someone taking over an expired domain and redirecting it; Soulja Boy wasn't selling anything except his album.

Well I mean this seems entirely reasonable to me - I’m not sure but I suspect he isn’t an engineer, and even if he is, why waste time and money on designing something that has already been designed and built?

I’m also surprised that so many people in the comments are against this, especially given how often I’ve seen people on HN arguing we should be getting rid of IP law.

> especially given how often I’ve seen people on HN arguing we should be getting rid of IP law.

Anecdotally, after years of being on HN I can't recall anyone arguing to get rid of copyright.

Tons of arguments for getting rid of software patents, strengthening fair use, and putting abandonware in the public domain but flat out against copyright as a concept is a bit extreme for NH.

Again, just an anecdote based on my experience.

There was a post a few weeks about getting rid of IP laws, with many comments from many people arguing that we should definitely get rid of all IP laws, including copyright.

I must have missed that one. Again, just an anecdote, not saying that people who want to get rid of all copyright don't exist just that I haven't seen them.

We’re on the internet, anecdotes should always be treated as facts :)

I can't remember who made them, but older System76 machines were not made by System76.

They were rebadged Clevos, like most of the boutique laptops out there (Alienware, what have you).

To be fair, whenever that's brought up here, they normally drop in and say that they worked with Clevo to design a SKU that would have great Linux support out of the box.

HN is not a monolith.

What is Linux 3.0 OS?

Where do I invest?

Step 1: Take money out of wallet

Step 2: Set money on fire

Step 3: You've just saved money but not investing in something that will be mired in copyright infringement cases.

Could just link to the original IGN article: https://www.ign.com/articles/2018/12/05/souljaboy-is-selling...

That's some solid irony

Thanks! Updated from https://www.highsnobiety.com/p/soulja-boy-video-game-console....

(You!)

Soulja Boy, I tell 'em

Hey, I got a new cheap emulator for you all called the SouljaGame

You!

You gotta steal intellectual property rights then crank back three times from left to right

Wonder if he got a supaman game on dat hoe

I would listen to this song.

LMAO this is funny as hell

He's also selling cheap imitation of Hip-Hop as music.

Got 'em.

He sold enough of that "imitation hip hop" to never have to work another day in his life . Wish I had that luxury.

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