Recently, I saw that there are many cottage game consoles in the live broadcast room that are selling very hot, so let's talk about some stories about the cottage game consoles.
Not long ago, Baidu Switch Bar published a high-profile post: someone said that he sent an NS to his sister, which attracted the envy of his sister's classmates. But the next day, the sister's classmates also had a NS sent by the parents, and the owner of the post was very shocked, thinking that no parent would be rich enough to buy NS for the child, until he found out that the child's NS was a copycat version.

Needless to say, the post was ridiculed, partly because of the poster's contempt for children, and partly because he saw NS as something expensive enough to pretend. But later, the direction of discussion in this post changed, and everyone began to list the domestic cottage machines they had seen, and people were surprised to find that there were so many types of these cottage machines.
Most of them can only play some cottage games, or old games, and some even just use NS-style toys. If you put these copycat versions of NS together, I am afraid that I will not be able to hold a small exhibition. It's really just the image of the design.
According to inertial thinking, we should list these strange copycat machines, and then criticize them shamelessly plagiarism, and scold them for losing the face of the countrymen. But you should have seen a lot of such cathartic things, so it is better to change directions and talk about things that you may not know for a while.
For example, not so many people overseas actually mock them.
Soon after the release of NS, domestic cottage machines were born, and around 19 years, these cottage machines began to appear overseas, such as Colombia.
In order to increase the difficulty of returns, the cottage opportunity sold to Europe and the United States is paid in other currencies - European and American netizens use the Indian rupee to buy a Japanese game console copied by a small Chinese factory.
In the past two years, the cottage NS has entered the vision of European and American players. At Ebay and AliExpress, you can find a number of copycat NSs, most of which are supposed to be from China and will appear in various locations Chinese. Sometimes even if the menu is in English, the game is Chinese.
Outrageous things attract traffic, so there are a large number of copycat NS unboxing videos on the tubing, making their fame soar in the past two years. Logically, these videos should attract a bunch of ridicule, after all, illegal business has not been washed.
But the reality is that most of the responses to these videos are not scolding. On the contrary, many people are very interested in these cottage NSs and say that they also want to try it. I posted some Google Translate comments here, you can also go to the comment area of some of these videos for yourself, you will find that this is a common phenomenon, and offensive hot reviews are rare.
The original text has various languages, and the screenshots are all Google Translate, which can probably see the meaning
Why is that? Ten years ago, "Made in China" was indeed an insult (although it did point to serious problems). But that was ten years ago, and now this rotten stem is seriously obsolete.
Instead, there are more and more people abroad who are positively evaluating Chinese-made small objects, such as cleverly designed plug converters. These small items are fully functional, of satisfactory quality, and inexpensive, and although they have not passed overseas safety testing, they do have real competitiveness.
Under the evaluation video of the cottage NS, many people are lamenting the cost-effectiveness and quality of the cottage machine. Many of these copycat NS are actually small mobile phones, they can play games, but also take pictures, watch e-books and play music, and some cottage NS even have a "host mode" like the real NS and can be connected to the external screen.
In addition, some cottage NS looks like a game console, but it is actually a peripheral, such as an external controller of a mobile phone. And some UP owners in the purpose of mockery to buy them, but accidentally found them very good: the external handle operation is smooth, retractable, easy to carry, not only for mobile phones, it can be spelled together into a computer controller, but also can be disassembled and installed on the genuine NS - we are familiar with the small workshop wild road.
The price of these cottage machines is mostly between 10 euros and 30 euros, and hundreds of yuan can buy this kind of thing, and foreigners who have not heard of commissaries and spelling sunsets are naturally shocked.
Also gave away cottage small toys

And a letter of praise from five stars...
Then, the retro games on these copycat machines are also attractive to overseas netizens. Copycat NS certainly can't play real NS games, but they do play Nintendo's old games, as well as the classics of the Red and White consoles.
This thing is actually a domestic mp4 multimedia video player that has been replaced by mobile phones, which may be the shape of the psp ten years ago.
Combining hundreds of pirated games into one, this is the little bully mode we are familiar with. But foreigners have not seen, when the Internet is globalized, such things have disappeared, because the cottage NS accidentally resurrected them, overseas netizens only know about it for the first time.
So in the comments, many people said that they very much want to buy this kind of retro game console, you can see that these cottage machines really awaken some people's childhood memories.
Well, now we have to touch on that core problem: foreigners look at these copycat machines that are all pirated copies, and some even write tutorials for pirated software into the manuals, don't they think that it must be strictly prohibited, and then a spray is given?
Teach you to pack pirated English manuals
To answer this, we have to say something very controversial - what is the attitude of the European and American people to piracy?
At the end of last year, while the verdict of the infringement case of the Renren subtitle group was being pronounced, a huge activity was being carried out overseas: solidarity with the originator of the pirated resource website "Pirate Bay". It was the 18th anniversary of The Pirate Bay, and its founder said that The Pirate Bay should last forever, which attracted the support of countless people and even led to the biographical drama of The Pirate Bay being established.
It sounds outrageous, but the three founders of The Pirate Bay are the heroes in the hearts of many European and American netizens. Most pirate websites are for bad money, but these three brothers really believe in the sharing spirit of the Internet to create The Pirate Bay. So after they were caught, they said that as long as The Pirate Bay can continue, the jail is worth it, and even take the pirated movie to the prison cell with a USB stick.
Another similar person is the woman who started Sci-Hub, the world's largest pirated paper website, who broke the law while breaking the monopoly of capital on academic papers because she believed that theoretical knowledge was for sharing, not profit.
Should The Pirate Bay exist? It absolutely kills many creators who work sincerely, stifles some masterpieces that could have been born in the cradle, and makes countless criminals make a fortune from piracy business; But at the same time, it gives many people in the world who would otherwise have no access to great works the opportunity to experience them.
We understand this feeling, and a lot of people overseas actually know it, as you can see from the hot reviews of millions of biographical videos that have been played in The Pirate Bay.
Now back to the cottage NS. Among the UP masters who evaluate copycat NS, the most famous is probably Ray Bacon, who has two million fans, who has made a lot of copycat NS unboxing videos. Under most of his review videos, people joked that these copycats were actually funny, except for one video.
In that video, he told a story of user contributions: a boy's mother bought him an "NS" to motivate him to study, but because the boy's mother was not rich, she bought a domestic cottage NS.
Under this video, people say that they dare not think about the boy's disappointment after discovering that NS is a copycat version, and the guilt of his mother. Many people commented that if this happened to them, they would never tell their mother that the game console was fake, and would treasure it as the most precious treasure.
Then, more and more commentators began to share their own similar experiences, saying that they had encountered similar things in their childhood, because their parents also wanted to buy them game consoles, but the economy was not rich, so they bought copycat versions, and these cottage machines became their treasures.
This is also the purpose of these cottage machine manufacturers - to deceive parents who cannot afford to buy genuine NS. But overseas netizens did not scold the cottage NS for this, because their price is usually only 1/10 of the real NS. If replaced by real NS, these parents will not be able to afford its price, let alone the subsequent expensive games, and at least these cottage machines give poor children games to play; Like the beginning of the article, the situation that the poster laughed at.
This video is the highest number of likes among the UP master's copycat NS-related works. His 6 million spit videos have 120,000 likes, and this 800,000 videos have 88,000 likes, and people hope that the anchor can give the boy a real NS.
Ray Bacon is a Spanish anchor whose economy was devastated after the subprime mortgage crisis in 2008. When we think of Europe and the United States, we shouldn't just think of London and Manhattan; Overseas not only Europe and the United States, but also Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia.
The gap between rich and poor, immigration status, economic crisis, natural and man-made disasters, life pressures... Not all parents will ban their children from playing games, but not all parents will be able to give their children a NS machine, which can happen in any corner of the world, and it is not a difficult thing to understand.
In fact, under many videos of the evaluation of the cottage NS, you can see similar comments. People also lament how nice it would have been to have had such a console as a child, because poverty prevented them from having a console in childhood.
Patent protection law is a double-edged sword. We have been living in the environment of piracy and plagiarism poisoning, which has destroyed our entertainment creators and fed a large number of criminals with the hard work of others, so we hate them to the bone; Without copyright protection, our articles would become worthless and unable to make ends meet. But this long-term pain does make us forget the other side of the sword.
On the other side of the sword, there is a gap. Patents are meant to protect creators, but in reality it is more often "protecting" big capital. Therefore, Tesla was lonely and poor all his life, but Edison used Tesla's achievements to frantically collect money and squeeze into primary school textbooks; The inventor of the safety pin and the sewing machine was also poor all his life, and his countless patents fed countless businessmen other than him.
Inventor of safety pins Walter Hunt
Nintendo has countless patents in console hardware and game design, and even the character is obscured to show this kind of thing with a silhouette, which is Nintendo's patent. Because Nintendo believed that the development of the game needed to contribute to each other, it did not pursue the copyright of these patents, but this did lead many designers to find another way to avoid them, fortunately, other methods are not patented.
But imagine Bach monopolizing Baroque music with patents, or an ancient Chinese dominating the five-voice scale. Then think about the exclusive strategies of console games: Are these exclusive strategies really reasonable to this day? Do civilian consumers really have an obligation to "protect" gaming giants to this extent?
Many times patents are actually telling the world that many things to enjoy must be eligible for admission, and the ticket is money - if you can't afford it, you have to make more money, otherwise it proves that you don't deserve it. But it often makes people forget that there are still parents in this world, children's curiosity and desire for the world, these reasons should not be worthless in determining eligibility, but they are like this.
Perhaps this is an important reason why the cottage NS has not been beaten by overseas netizens.
If Professor Chen's record is true, "One Hundred Years of Solitude" has not been introduced to China for a long time because when Márquez visited China in the 1990s, he found that the streets were full of his pirated books; So he angrily declared that he would not authorize China to publish his own works.
But he wrote about the loneliness of Latin America: a land that was lonely because of poverty, backwardness, civil strife and war. And that's the reality of poverty and loneliness: people will use every possible means to get something that makes a dry life wet with rain and dew—the desserts of the cottage, the books of the cottage, and the hope and happiness of the cottage.
Who is wrong? Certainly not Márquez, who deserves to be rewarded for creating masterpieces; Is that the fault of loneliness and poverty in Latin America?
No one knows the answer to a question, but we shouldn't ignore it just because we don't have it. Fortunately, the creators of the World Wide Web gave up the patent and dedicated the Internet to all mankind, otherwise we might not even have the opportunity to think here.
At the opening ceremony of the London Olympic Games, the entire venue was transformed for the father of the Internet and lit up with his famous words: "This (Internet) belongs to all".
Finally, you can also see a comment under these evaluation videos: Since these cottage machines are so powerful, why don't these manufacturers remove all illegal elements, honestly tell everyone what they can do, and then compete by strength?
Yeah, why?
Because these cottage machines steal the ideas and marketing that big companies spend a lot of money to build, and enjoy their success. Without these things, you can't make (cheat) so much money - this is the right answer, but unfortunately it can't answer the question.
A few years ago, the little bully did the host pounced, which became a joke that no one cared about, but that was in this world line. In another worldline, Duan Yongping was not forced to give up Xiao Bawang, did not turn to backgammon and did not do it, he did it according to his original idea, and made the game and the game console.
Can he succeed, and if he fails, will someone follow suit? I don't know, this doesn't happen on the worldline we live on. But I think at least then, we'll have a fair chance to compete.
With China's mobile phones, mobile games, TikToks and drones all seizing the global market, it is not outrageous to imagine that we actually have the ability to build first-class game consoles. But at the end of the day, what we still have is these copycat NSs: plagiarizing Nintendo's designs, framing the pirated games of the last century, with ugly identities and humble values.
To scold the cottage machine and piracy, it is really simple, use it to water an article, but also save time to play (genuine) games. But many things are not black and white, "existence is reasonable" is a mistranslation of Hegel's original words, but the existence of some things, can indeed explain some things that have existed for a long time, but in fact, it is not reasonable.
Are these excuses for piracy? Of course not, but there are times when there are questions behind piracy that are worth pondering, and this kind of reflection is not unique to us who have experienced the era of great piracy.
There is no doubt that these copycat versions of NS should of course be destroyed, and it is not a matter of pride that they have not been scolded after being spread overseas. But after destruction, inferiority and self-blame are not the only things that should be left behind; "Overseas netizens exclaimed that the cottage NS is bullish" is not the only thing that should be seen.
Because of the various things behind the fake NS, which is a simple "cottage" can be summarized? Whoever sells well, the market can test who is the last word!