Retrogaming console made in Bray-sur-Seine, or sweet French hypocrisy

Gwénaël R. assembles a retrogaming console visibly carrying a shovelful of illegal copies of video games and sells it for 280 euros. A case that is making noise to the point of closing the sales site for said console. A look back at the bad buzz of the weekend and the hypocrisy of those who cry wolf.

The Seine-et-Marne edition of Le Parisien published this weekend the portrait of Gwénaël R., a young entrepreneur presenting himself as the inventor of a retrogaming console delivered with hundreds of “games that have become legally free” and almost entirely made in Seine-et-Marne. Two false pieces of information which did not go unnoticed on X, triggering a flood of criticism and denunciations.

We dissected the matter into three points: equipment, games and prices, all based on the articles from Parisien 77, La République de Seine-et-Marne, but also on the comments of Gwénaël R. himself that we reached by phone. And as is often the case, the conclusion teaches us that we should not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Free software and Asus card

Gwénaël R. is 37 years old, he is the one who built the Gwardbox 2, the famous console. In reality, it is enough to look at the information given in the article in Le Parisien and the associated clichés to realize that the young man is only her assembler and that she is absolutely not “made almost entirely in Bray-sur-Seine”as Sébastien Blondé asserts in his article of May 25, 2024.

This console is based on an Asus nano motherboard, a Tinker Board R2.0 to be precise. It is a competing model of the Raspberry Pi, which was already used to assemble retrogaming consoles yourself. Nothing French here.

For the software part, we are undoubtedly on a Recalbox or similar, a platform capable of emulating a multitude of consoles and distributed free of charge.

A controller is sold with the Gwardbox 2, it is a 8Bitdo SN30 Pro. The Republic of Seine-et-Marne, at the beginning of May, explains that this controller is “ an 8Bitdo controller, Nintendo’s supplier. Comments that Gwénaël R., whom we contacted by telephone, logically refutes.

It’s so big that we would like not to explain, but 8Bitdo is a third-party manufacturer of Chinese controllers, some products of which are compatible with Nintendo consoles, but which produces absolutely nothing for the Japanese giant.

Only the shell is made locally

Finally, there remains the shell of the Gwardbox 2. On its first version, “the case was made of acrylic, transparent and made in China. But the fact of offering a Chinese box bothered me”, explains Gwénaël R. in the columns of La République de Seine-et-Marne, and this is understandable. So he rolled up his sleeves and made a new case. It is designed and printed in 3D, and decorated by “the painter from the AD garage in Bray”. This is the only part of Gwardbox 2 really made in Seine-et-Marne.

A fabulous margin

And then there is the price of the Gwardbox 2. 280 euros, that’s the bill for a console that you can make yourself and full of pirated games. For the purposes of an article, I built a similar machine based on Raspberry Pi in 2017. It cost me less than 60 euros, controller included (an 8bitdo…). The Asus Tinker Board R2.0 costs around a hundred euros and the emulation software is free. If we take away the price of a house-cast and painted hull, we get a good idea of ​​the substantial profit that Gwared collected on each sale.

Gwénaël R. had sold around forty copies of her first model released in 2019. Her Gwardbox 2 will not have seen the light of day, or it took too little time to sell, reports Gwénaël R. As indicated in the introduction, her page sales was deactivated during the day. All that remains is its remainders available on the Internet Archive and which tells us a little more about the software project.

A console “sold without games”

Hardware is one thing, but what Internet users point out the most are games and a legal point concerning them. When Gwénaël R. explains that his machine is capable of emulating games from 62 consoles, the Parisian adds that it comes with a 10,700 games “all become legally free after a period of marketing and by decision of their publisher”. And this is serious since it is false and illegal.

The photos which decorate the article in Le Parisien show Metal Slug, a SNK game whose rights have absolutely not been abandoned. The same goes for Super Mario or Sonic which are mentioned. Nintendo and Sega have never let go of any title from their mascots. From there to drawing a parallel with pirated copies, there is only one step.

But the Parisian would not have understood anything, tells us Gwénaël R. who assures us that his consoles have never been sold with games. 10700 games “that was the capacity it could hold, we could have scored 100,000 for arcade games because it weighs nothing. » And for the Metal Slug “we have to give an example. When journalists come, if I show them something where there is no game, I show them a case with a motherboard and a fan.”

And we would like to believe it. But gray areas remain. Starting with this tweet from May 10 which talks about “enjoying more than 6000 games” Snes, MegaDrive or PS1. A ” clumsiness “, defends the owner of Gwared.

It could be okay if we hadn’t taken a look at the Internet Archives. There, a capture of the site dating from the end of 2022 and talking about the Gwardbox clearly specifies that “you will be able to play more than 10,000 games included”. Difficult to justify unless you can produce a list of 10,000 royalty-free games on the machines indicated. Good luck.

The retrogaming console, this sweet hypocrisy

But in hindsight, whether these games are pirated or not, is it really reasonable to attack a small entrepreneur from the 77. Twitter, YouTube and even a website, his project was for everyone to see, without taboo. You would have to be unconscious to make such publicity around a scabrous project! Unawareness or ignorance of the subject, difficult to decide, but its social hype is well worth our attention.

Indeed, this affair pushes us to think further. This French initiative is an echo of the resuscitation of retrogaming. And because of the contradictions in the matter, this echo should not be there, at least in France.

In 2024, portable consoles with emulators will multiply like hotcakes on Aliexpress and others. Miyoo Mini+, Anbernic RG35XX and so on. And French influencers are writing about them and testing them… despite the thousands of pirate games they carry. And that’s without counting on the arrival of console emulators on iOS. We have the right to possess them, but not the right to use them.

And it is under this layer of hypocrisy that the local project of a “small IT craftsman”. If this console had come from China, we wouldn’t have made a fuss about it. Importing a product containing pirated games, yes, but producing it in France, no. This is the whole problem of the economic system which does not allow all the floodgates to be closed and leaves behind people like Gwénaël R. who, without saying it, was perhaps not aware that he was breaking the law so much. with his Gwardbox.