Soulja Boy has stopped selling his game consoles after Nintendo threatened legal action, and it’s not too hard to see why.
You might remember Soulja Boy from such late 2000s classics as "Crank That (Soulja Boy)", and "Kiss Me Thru the Phone". He’s still making music, but since then he’s found a much more profitable side gig: branded tech.
On SouljaWatch.com, you can buy anything from cheap Apple Watch knockoffs to handheld game consoles loaded with thousands of retro games. Or at least you could as little as a few days ago. Nintendo has since contacted Soulja Boy and told him to stop selling those retro consoles of they’d bust out the lawyers.
According to MyNintendoNews, Nintendo’s beef with Soulja’s consoles was pretty much everything, from the outer design to the games that were stored on them. SouljaWatch sold several console systems, including a knockoff Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, Wii, and PlayStation 3, only instead of accepting discs and cartridges, they all accepted microSD cards to play illegally emulated ROMs.
Ever since Nintendo discovered they could make a buck off reselling old games from their back catalog, the Japanese game maker has been on the warpath, shutting down emulator and ROM sites left and right. Last November, Nintendo won a $12 million settlement against the owners of LoveROMS.com and LoveRETRO.co and caused both sites to shut down. Many other ROM sites also shut down in fear of Nintendo’s litigious wrath.
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Soulja had indeed heard of Nintendo’s actions but tweeted on December 29th that Nintendo wouldn’t come after him legally. Apparently, he was wrong since those tweets have since been taken down along with every game console SouljaWatch.com was selling.
You can still get other Soula-branded knockoffs, such as the Apple Watch (called SouljaWatch), Beats Bluetooth headphones, and Apple Pods (called SouljaPods), as well as far less illegal Android tablets and phones. But the games are all gone for good.
Well, not really. It turns out that Soulja Boy was just reselling Chinese game consoles that are still widely available on AliExpress.com. They’re even cheaper over there, and Nintendo wouldn’t dare try to sue the biggest Chinese retailer on the planet.