The fact is this seller is making bootlegs solely focused on the more expensive titles. It's all about the money...they know what they're doing. And none of it is ending up with the original owner/developer which means zero income and zero motivation to make new games.
Cave wasnt gonna make new arcade games anyways. They havent released any new arcade titles in 12 years. There's zero indications that they'd want to do non-mobile games any more.
This chinese bootlegger is well aware of our niche market and community and is bleeding us out of every penny if the can. We are the target. They are not doing us any favours, that would imply giving us a selection of any title or a multi. By creating a fomo and trickling the pcb's out they can keep the price high for a long as possible. If there's a steady stream of them quickly replacing any sold pcb the price will eventually go down. We don't know if there are enough components to make 10 more pcb's or 1000.
Yeah I mean, this is much more complicated than the typical bootleg, especially with the legacy part sourcing. Will be interesting to see how many they make, but I hope its a lot
maybe also so as to not get the wrath of Cave on their backs ,(ak is still relatively new and I'm sure under watch in some sense) I'd be sure ebay would ban if cave followed up with them ,not sure about aliexpress if they turned up there .
Why would they care? There's been Cave bootlegs of the PGM games on ebay for a loooong time. This is not very different from those in terms of legality (yes I know the original games are stand-alone pcbs, not carts, but the cart bootlegs are still illegal copies).
Akai Katana came out 14 years ago. Thats not new.
That's it in a nutshell and the problem is that they might be wrongly mistaken as an original. Someone unscrupulous could make his own stickers and try to sell it as original.
I mean this is already a problem when buying cart-based arcade stuff. Look at Atomiswave or whatever.
It's a problem, but nothing new, and at least so far, these are easier to identify than cart bootlegs. (Different silkscreen, edge connector, different vias...)
Basically, the thing that makes these new ones more controversial is that they're using some sort of reverse engineered gerbers of the original hardware... but I mean, bootlegs/repros/conversions are illegal copies even without this, so it's not like its THAT much more problematic.
I dunno, it's just cool that more people can play these games as they were intended.