Game Boy Color
Image: Zion Grassl / Time Extension

The retro publisher FerranteCrafts has taken to social media to provide an update on why some of its physical games are disappearing from their Etsy store, and the reason is honestly pretty baffling to us.

According to the owner of FerranteCrafts, the e-commerce site is accusing the Game Boy publisher of piracy, despite the small manufacturer only selling products it has made itself.

In case you're unfamiliar with FerranteCrafts, it is responsible for releasing complete-in-box versions of various homebrew titles for the Nintendo Game Boy, such as Hunt the Gwumbus, Black Castle, and G-Zero, and is also behind the physical versions of Sebastian Staacks' GB Interceptor — a tool that can be plugged into your Game Boy's cartridge slot to record your gameplay. All of these products are being sold with the permission of their original developers and are all manufactured directly by FerranteCrafts themselves. However, that hasn't stopped Etsy from flagging and removing several of its games from sale.

As FerranteCrafts explains in a thread:

"Some of you may have noticed some games disappearing from the Etsy shop over the past 3 months. I've been trying to contact Etsy since they removed the first one, but it took 2,5 months to finally get an actual reply instead of the automated ones.

I assume this started because there are now clones popping up on AliExpress, so some bot probably detected it and thought I wasn't making the cartridges and other things myself. This seemed to be confirmed when I finally got a human to tell me they removed the items because they were a resold item.

However, after I explained all of this they suddenly changed the reason to promoting piracy by selling unauthorized or counterfeit copies of video games.

Since I have permission from all game creators, who make their own games, I explained this but the conversation was abruptly ended by Etsy mentioning they now consider the case closed and will not reconsider."

We've reached out to Etsy to see if it can shine a light on this decision, and potentially reconsider.

In the meantime, you can still buy blank cartridges and GB Interceptors from FerranteCraft's Etsy store, but everything else will have to be bought from the publisher's website.

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[source bsky.app]