I myself have spent weeks navigating the maze of dodgy NanoVNAs out there. Even one of the official resellers decided to cut costs and ship out poorly functioning clones and try and deny it.
Can’t win so don’t play. Eventually the markets will fall due to crap saturation.
Independent developer developed a flashcart for the Sega Dreamcast and was subsequently ripped off. After he complained on Twitter, most of the community sided with the cloners. They just want their cheap garbage and they have no idea/care regarding the massive effort it takes to develop a device like this.
Never mind the fact that the original developer will be inundated with support/bugfix requests for the clones while the Chinese cloners disappear into the ether having stolen all the value.
He eventually walked away from the project from what I recall which pissed off his original buyers and now others have stepped up with their own devices(And will probably be cloned).
Luckily the one (temporary) respite you have in software/hardware is DRM. If you can implement a complex enough DRM system you can slow down the cloners from stealing your software for some period of time. It sucks but this is the world we live in.
One tactic that a Flashcart manufacturer is using is some sort of serial coded firmware updates that only operates on a specific date code of flashcart. It requires the user to log into an account and get the specific firmware update that is tied to their flashcart. It has caused some complaints from the community regarding ease of use + resale woes(transferring ownership from one legit user to another) but overall this is an interesting solution. It hasn't fully prevented clones but has slowed them down somewhat.
I wish there was some way this could be applied to the non-software world but you can't defeat the physical layer.
Yes, I know flashcarts are also commonly used for homebrew, and I use mine exclusively for homebrew. I also understand that many of the older games have become collectors items, and wanting to play backups instead of the original is another use case. This doesn't change one of it's most common use cases, which is playing illegal roms.
I watched as this high schooler got harassed for years as people did not believe such a product was even possible. After he released it, everyone forgot about all the harassment that this product was vaporware and impossible to develop and now he continued to get hounded for bug fixes to fix timing issues with specific games(he is emulating the complete CD drive and many games expected exact timings to overcome specific undocumented bugs in the system).
Now you have to throw in the threat of clones. To this day he is continuing to fully support the product despite some clones appearing in the wild. A competing product has recently appeared that takes a simpler approach to emulating the CD drive and likely has not had as extensive of a QA process. It remains a question whether this other approach is better compared to PSIO(new product only supports 3 motherboard versions out of dozens + you lose the CD drive altogether) but because the price is cheaper a large chunk of the community does not care and have moved on. The remaining community are now bashing the PSIO team for temporary slowing down development to rewrite the firmware to stop the latest round of cloners.
You can look at it as theft, but others would see it as preserving and promoting software development on a ~28 year old console. This team also gone into excruciating detail to document the system to help enable new software to be developed.
Just from the outside looking in, I don't know if it is worth the effort to spend years making something like this only to be harassed nonstop for years, getting your IP stolen by the Chinese and in end still be making a product that is a grey market item. I suspect that down the road we will have nothing but low quality Chinese made junk on the market if anything at all.
There's always going to be the originals, which will almost definitely hold value for the lifetime of millennials at least.
This is always going to be a small market driven by passion. If you can write a PlayStation flash cart you can almost defiantly make something with a higher market value.
There is an active market for extremely high quality products in this space. Look at Analogue (analogue.co) which is building FPGA reference-quality reproductions of classic consoles (NES, SNES, GENSIS, and recently GB/GBC/GBA). These machines play original carts better than original hardware, they are widely critically acclaimed, and the company keeps outputting fantastic machines. Many speed running and other competitive organizations accept plays running on analogue hardware, but not other knock-off consoles.
The gaming community just seems to suck as customers. You see this with all the hate a publisher gets when they release something that isn't perfect as well.
There are also people buying the Everdrive clones and then expecting support. I have seen these complaints on Reddit and in various forums. I don't know how rampant this is but its so silly.
You're right though, that in general the end users are very much entitled assholes in general, and there are still people buying Everdrive clones, even when the real deal was still in stock and available. But Everdrive is still successful for Krikzz, and all of the clones out there are based on a very outdated design that his newer devices are far surpassing in terms of features and support.
This seems like an opportunity in disguise. Provide paid support, possibly after upselling the crowd to genuine product if required. Then word-of-mouth will be to the original dev's benefit; few will side with the fly-by-night cloners.
DRM makes your product less "hackable" by the customer and less likely to sustain a committed community. It's a very short sighted approach.