On Friday, Italy's financial police reported dismantling a sizable video game and console trafficking operation in Italy, based primarily on bootlegged consoles with pirated video games from China [h/t TechXplore]. The scale of this operation places the monetary value at roughly $52.5 million when converted to USD, per the Turin financial police's head of economic crime unit Alessandro Langella, who factors the value of both the ~12,000 seized consoles and the pirated games within that figure.
The pirated games were primarily from popular franchises, and the bootlegged consoles were all based on retro Nintendo, Sega, or Atari hardware. The only named examples of game series favored by the pirates are Super Mario Bros., Street Fighter, and Star Wars. Still, chances are quite high that these bootlegged consoles included near-complete retro console libraries onboard.
