A Reddit post in the GameBoy subreddit caught some eyes. It showed a fake yellow Game Boy Pokémon cartridge displayed at a GameStop. The post received many comments, pointing out the poor quality of this bootleg Pokémon game.
This has sparked concern, especially with GameStop launching new Retro GameStops across North America, where retro game authenticity should be a priority.
Lol, it’s Game Stop not the Library of Congress. These are minimum wage employees they’re not trained in repro carts
If they’re cheap and common games, I don’t think it’s a big deal to have fakes mixed in if it doesn’t bother the buyer either.
Now for more rare stuff, it matters more. Feels like mtg cards, where a certain threshold it should be graded for authenticity and condition
Video game grading is a massive scam. Karl Jobst did a series of videos on it, and it’s basically price rigging and speculation investments for profit.
No one is going to be making a fake Madden 99 cart for the gbc, it’s always going to be the heavy hitters like pokemon or atlus games. Idk how they prevent fakes on both ends tbh, from taking in fakes to selling them as well. But if they’re going to sell them they better be responsible about it.
In any case, isn’t it illegal for them to not ensure they’re legit? Selling counterfeits is definitely illegal
I think the employees would have a database of titles to ascertain value, so they are basically trained in this field.
I would argue that the employees may be negligent in the need to verify with the database due to being overworked minimum wage part timers who are just looking to “get the job done” and not care about mistakes made.
The presence of a database also does not mean they are explicitly taught to say “you need to use this database to verify, here is how to query it and ensure it looks right”
GameStop could probably address this partially with hyper-focused UI walking them through a review but then employees are just going to hit “next next next” just to get it done
I think this idea is cursed and a bad idea for GameStop to implement because this is inevitable and we are going to see this over and over again. This was already a recurring joke at some locations selling older games, esp. Pokemon, prior to GameStop formalizing the “Retro” branding
