A lifetime of “cranking it” has come to an end, Soulja Boy has pivoted to selling his own video game consoles and gadget accessories.

…Okay, now I’ve let the image sink in, let’s break this story down. Soulja Boy has been a self-professed gamer his entire life - actually having his own gaming video blog for a while and challenging people regularly on Xbox Live in the late 2000s.

After creating quite the annoying song hook (annoying because of how so insanely memorable it is, to the point I find myself hopping from side to side even today after a few pints), he seems to have made the unlikely leap into the hardware business.

Take a look at his store front - Souljawatch - you’ll see the handheld and home-based consoles on there, alongside a suspiciously cheap watch. 

And the first thing you’ll take from seeing these two products? It all looks a bit legally sketchy, doesn’t it?

One looks like a rip off Xbox One S, the handheld looks generic and both brag about playing hundreds of classic games from other systems (ranging from Playstation and old school Sega, to GBA and 3DS), which wanders into emulator territory.

You’d be right to think it’s sketchy, as it turns out these are, indeed, unbranded emulators that Soulja Boy is selling as his own.

While I’m curious about his own platform of games he talks about “SOULJAGAME,” I’m going to go ahead and say this is just hyperbole and what you’re actually getting is a poorly made rip off console without any actual extended support.

In fact, the original consoles have been found on Chinese online shopping site Aliexpress - the “retro mini video game mini console” and “2018 Portable Video Handheld Game Console” by renowned emulator maker Albernic.

Soulja’s response? Well it’s all designed by him and his team apparently, even though the headphones are a dead rip off of Beats and you already know about the console…

Allow me to clarify - I’m not to criticise any person for pursuing the capitalistic dream that any human being is well within their rights to chase. If I could make money doing what I love, I totally would. And I get he might be passionate about it - thanking his first customer and calling himself a “kid with a dream.”

However, our boy does is reselling emulators as your own creations at an obscenely inflated price, even though the public are well aware of the cheaper original knock-off consoles (a weirdly oxymoronic phrase) that are available for a third of the price.

Something just seems to be a little disingenuous about that, but I’ll leave that up to you all. Could just be a grumpy brit about all this…

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