DeAndre Cortez Way, known by his rapper persona Soulja Boy, found himself the target of both legal issues and the ire of gamers after it became known that he was selling knockoff electronics on his websites. The practice of drop shipping is pretty common, as it involves sourcing cheap items from different manufacturers, then reselling those items to consumers. But the ease of access to this particular business is due to the fact that someone can simply contract another company to handle all of the shipping and other issues for them. It’s likely this easy approach to making money that enticed Mr. Way to begin selling various products. Problem was, many of these were clearly unlicensed imitations of popular brands.
The focus of this particular controversy was a set of emulation consoles sold with hundreds of stolen ROMs for various retro games preloaded onto them.For example, the SouljaGame Fuze is none other than Fuze Entertainment’s Chinese home console, the Fuze Tomahawk F1, an Android powered console made for China. Gamers began digging and found that these Chinese consoles were made to look like modern consoles like the PS4, but had none of the associated quality. A terrible library of games, buggy emulation, and a lack of usability options made these inferior machines a huge waste of money, especially considering the premium price Mr. Way was selling them for, a price higher than other retailers like Amazon and Ebay sellers.
And after a ton of posturing, including some since deleted tweets containing homophobic language aimed at detractors, it appears that Mr. Way has found himself on the wrong end of a potential lawsuit from Nintendo. Anyone who has been paying attention knows Nintendo to be a very litigious entity who aggressively defend their intellectual property. And any person with a shred of common sense can guess where this whole thing has ended up.
News broke this month that Nintendo has filed a suit against Mr. Way, leading to more potential legal action. Although it seems that the suit has been settled as the products were eventually pulled from sale, at least most of them, as his site still lists imitation Apple products for sale. All in all, Soulja Boy has landed himself in some potentially really deep trouble, all in the pursuit of just a bit more cash.
