It’s 2026, and Limited Run Games’ Quality Control is Hopeless

You did it.

You all made me finally write the followup I did not want to make.

For years I resisted this since well, I personally moved on from LRG, I got my last pending order delivered in 2023, and outside of their digital efforts being a thing that crossed my line of intrigue, (and was a bit on a recent article I made on digital compilations) I’ve stayed away from them and people involved. It also was pretty apparent that for LRG’s faults, they’ve always had way less problems than some of the other companies I covered lately who outright dodge refund requests as their main habit.

But somehow my Ko-fi goal I made as a bit of a joke on how my site’s work was something I didn’t mind doing without pay… Got smashed in a day by a IRL friend who suggested I make the Kofi to begin with. Over a year ago. So thus, I can now boast that this article was brought to you by a supporter of the Seafoam Gaming Ko-Fi, and I sincerely apologize for the delay. You’ll pretty much learn after reading this how I really didn’t want to actually write this, but someone has got to do a call out of this industry one final time.

I also have a bit of an amusing story to share on the Ko-Fi and something related to that goal later in the article.

So yeah. It’s opinion time, on this big, big Opinion piece, years in the (non) making! Recent events have revealed some interesting tidbits to me, and it’s been a running gag that anytime I’d near the end of writing my skeleton of the article, I’d learn something new or see something stupid Limited Run would pull that would lead me to revamp multiple paragraphs or throw them out altogether, so I do sincerely apologize for how damn long this took. I think i’m at around eight rewrites by the time you’re reading this, and sooner or later I have to put up a giant stop sign before I get asked the day after this goes live what I thought of X or Y factor about LRG. I literally added on a “true ending” to the article because this was fully finished, being looked over by an industry pal, and then i had to freeze it in ice for reasons you’ll understand in that last section. Then I had to add an extra, extra epilogue on top of that, since the whole ordeal was just so stupid to watch unfold, it changed my mindset on this whole market a little bit.

I’m not commenting anymore on this unless I feel like it, which I pretty much won’t. I just hope my piece will inspire others in the industry who can comment, to do so and push for the change much needed in this company as a whole, and really this whole “limited collector edition” subindustry that is doing more to mess up physical games than help them. The fact more collector types are keen to either support the current efforts/nature of things in hopes of keeping physical games going via heart shocks, rather than risk it flatlining faster, is pretty telling.

Nevertheless, I’d eventually end up doing a rather big investigation on how the company was handling QC/other aspects starting from last year, and learned more from various sources about aspects of LRG/their QC I wasn’t able to find out before, along with major shakeups within the company. I won’t really go into that much info on the sourced stuff however, outside of some older stuff that’s been backed up elsewhere or is pretty easy to infer, since I want to keep this as an opinion piece focusing primarily on their quality control and if they actually improved it one iota in the 4 years since this arc began.

Still, we do need to follow a bit of a timeline, and that means jumping back where we left off, which is fitting since shortly after my last article…

ACT 1: CATCHING UP ON THE PAST

The Deep Embrace

Literally weeks after my last LRG article, they got bought out by the Embracer Group, the same day they bought the freaking Lord of the Rings novel rights. This was during them spending a shitload of money on things, which backfired on them in such a way that it led to 2023 being one of the worst years for video game layoffs and closures in the industry, a bunch of which stemmed from Embracer related purchases. (2024 and 2025 haven’t been much better, even if Embracer’s closing spree seems to have slowed for now)

Their main reasoning for acquiring LRG was due to them wanting LRG’s Carbon Engine, which is funny considering how rocky the rollout of that has been. They also seem to have done this to roll out LRG in Europe finally, but that is still not done as of this writing, despite being promised for 2023 ages ago. If anything, Clear River Games has become the go-to EU publisher for the bigger LRG stuff, and that’s all retail and very easy to obtain, and LRG publishes some of their games and vice versa. Granted, all of Embracer’s recent troubles stem from a failed deal with the Saudi Arabian government, so I can see why Embracer put a lot of those bigger EU plans on the backburner. (Quite honestly, I’m glad that deal fell through, the Saudi govt is never to be trusted in gaming, ever.)

Thankfully, LRG survived the restructuring intact, which is honestly a very good thing since much as I personally dislike them, nobody should be losing their jobs in that way, especially in an era where we already have some of the earliest gaming industry legends dropping out or getting laid off for good. I have some bigger issues with more higher-up LRG staffers/public figures later, but even still, corporate buyout bullshit shouldn’t cost anyone their jobs for that reason alone, and way too many companies/businesses have been slashed to pieces by Embracer in the aftermath of all this.

But yeah, in the years since this buyout, newcomers like to point to this moment as being the ultimate downfall of LRG, and the main reason behind their shipping queue woes and bad QC because of capitalism and whatnot. I’m gonna nip that in the bud and say while their shipping queue has gotten to unacceptably bad levels and that may be partly due to Embracer (though I have good reason to assume it isn’t), their QC has been bad years before Embracer. Their communication has been bad years before Embracer. Some aspects have actually improved slightly post Embracer, but not enough in a way that offsets that god awful shipping queue we’ll mention later, and even that has had a recent turnaround for the better, albeit a shaky one. If anything, LRG operated pretty much as they always had post the buyout, just with more access to IP and bigger licenses due to being part of a bigger company, which did lead to a shift I find unfortunate for the company considering their humble origins as helping out Indie devs, but more on that later.

Still, 2022 continued pretty much as normal. You may remember last time I touched on how then COO Douglas Bogart was posting on CheapassGamer forums after I started posting there again, and how most of his posts were responses to people unhappy with the company or me cracking remarks about their QC/company. Despite me making it clear I would not engage him directly, he didn’t get the memo and still had moments of Posting Through It. I eventually dipped when I got my final LRG item and hadn’t peeked at it much since then, so I don’t really have anything else to add here (I did post very very recently, in light of recent events, but mainly to dunk on people trying to use my old forum posts there as ammo for weird internet wars)

Still, for an active COO, it was definitely a very weird move and he’d do that off and on without prompting, (though much less frequently after being forced out; more on that later) but on the bright side I heard less stories of him and Josh outright name searching randos on Twitter and starting petty arguments with them. In fact, Josh became relatively quiet and was more known for random photos of his expensive game collection annoying people waiting on pending orders more than anything else. Or hyping up big announcements that ended up being pretty “big” games that you’d think would get a normal retail release, but somehow LRG got, or outright nonsense like The Three Stooges for NES getting a reprint.

They expanded to Japan, released a few of their games there via their new branch, Super Deluxe (which seem to have been received significantly better in terms of QC, shipping, and availability, and none of my JP friends have had really any complaints with those versions in any way, a clear sign that if LRG wanted to, they could just mitigate that in their own branch, and I chalk a lot of Super Deluxe’s improved quality with being headed up by 8-4), but all things considered post buyout, LRG was continuing as they typically did with some CEs coming in with cheap components, and some turning out just fine with people who bought standard editions being generally happy due to decent turnaround time and them becoming a lot more predictable in that regard. You’d think that’d encourage them to heavily “cut back” on CE SKUs as they constantly promised, over and over and over again, but alas, they still do like to do that. And people still do have a year+ wait for them. And sometimes it can still end up coming out quite messy, vs just buying a game by itself and getting in a few months.

And then 2023 hit. And then chaos and management shakeups broke out. And what might just be the stupidest controversy that made the internet mad at them kicked off.

Managing Transphobia

In late 2022 I got tipped off by multiple people, about how someone I knew of from the LRG staff, via the company Discord back when I was around there, was following some uh, not so savory accounts on Twitter. Mostly alt-right influencers where their main goals were to make the lives of people miserable through bigotry, mainly that of the Transgender community.

To go into this further would be a huge mess and I don’t want to reignite powder kegs that finally calmed down, so I’ll just leave it at that and guide you to instead support LGBT charities that deserve the help rather than give those bad people any amount of naming or attention. Just think of the stereotypical TERFs you hear about from Twitter, and that’s a good chunk of who this person was following.

Still, when I first heard about this… I didn’t think anything too immediately off about it? I honestly assumed maybe it was in error, or maybe it was done to keep tabs on those people. It just didn’t seem possible to me to immediately assume someone of that position would follow such bigoted people on purpose. I know several of my peers who begrudgingly do follow some of those indivduals on mute for the sole purpose of keeping tabs on them, though personally I’d never do such a thing myself and I don’t think it’s vital you have a connection open to every possible bigot on social media platforms. Especially considering Twitter is more than happy to show you that shit against your will, which is the primary reason I just outright deleted my account there. (Sorry if that broke so many embeds on the site, including in the prior LRG posts)

To zoom out a bit on the position that these reports were about, the person in question was the then-current community manager for LRG. She helped a lot on the Twitch channel showing off upcoming games, she helped a ton on the LRG Reddit by being the only one moderating the darn place for over a year, and was pretty much the active one in the discord for the company relaying feedback to and from buyers and the company. To me at least, even when I had my big public breakup with LRG, that CM seemed like one of the last people I’d suspect of having the same kind of terrible views as the people she was following on Twitter, so I didn’t think much of those tips, mostly due to not wanting to jump the gun and become the LRG Outrage Factory pumping out articles on every single bit of sourced info for news. It was at that point I was becoming more resistant to the idea of making limprint articles in general, only really doing so for both FPG/SLG due to the necessity of their ghosting of consumers. Compared to actual scamming though, a Community Manager rumor I wasn’t sure was even true, would be silly to focus on.

There’s also the fact that well, it would be incredibly stupid for a community manager to be seriously supporting bigoted figureheads in their personal life, despite selling, promoting and announcing dozens upon dozens of games with LGBT characters, made by LGBT developers, over the course of many years. Surely Limited Run would have done some sort of vetting or realized something was off if that was the case, right?

Thus, after some thought about getting tipped off about it, and the fact I refused to just publish every last tip of LRG sent my way after I stated I didn’t want to make any more articles focusing on the company, I passed on the news tips, refused to write about it, and just figured maybe she was following a concerning amount of alt-righters, but maybe it was for some monitoring reason else because again, why would LRG hire a transphobe to help sell games made by LGBT creators?

Well, weeks would go by, the new year would roll around, and I would be tipped off yet again that the CM was still following a lot of these awful accounts, and even some more I missed the first time that had zero reason to be an account one would follow unless you were sympathetic or supportive of their causes; the big alt-right commentary youtubers, the bearded racists, and far more TERF accounts that couldn’t be more blatant that they were TERFs and transphobes, and one that you shouldn’t follow ever for monitoring purposes. I’m talking toxic individuals you’d just want to block immediately and that spout slurs constantly with no remorse or directly target minorities on the internet all day, not good stuff.

The mask and any benefit of the doubt was starting to wear off to my eyes, but before I could do anything myself, (which my intention was originally to poke some indie devs with games currently releasing through LRG, and ask “yo you realize this PR lady is helping sell your game despite following the kind of people who’d harm you, right? Could you follow up on that? Did you know this? Could you ask around?” and wondering if it was a thing they knew or if LRG even knew) someone else noticed this trend too, and made it public on Twitter. Being a member of the LGBT community that the accounts the CM was following was directly harming, this person rightfully raised a point that uh, shouldn’t a company selling LGBT indie games not have someone following a bunch of TERF accounts as their PR manager? And asked LRG to take the proper action or at least clarify things. The fact it seemed increasingly likely their CM was following harmful people on purpose made this person rightfully angry, and they insisted on answers.

And then a series of chaotic events began. People pointed out and dug around and noticed that the CM didn’t even seem to be too LGBT tolerant at all, nor bothered to ever vocally oppose to the sort of toxic bigotry a bunch of the people she followed on Twitter were spewing, and multiple folks across gaming called for LRG to do something about it; from firing her outright, asking her to clarify and clear up any misunderstandings if there were any, or any action at all to prove that surely, LRG didn’t have a secret transphobe running their social media for over a year without their knowledge.

A bunch of mixed messages were shared around, and with the sale of Twitter the previous fall to a man who doesn’t even treat his own daughter with respect, a concerning amount of defense from the most extreme of alt-right chuds came to counter the concerned members of the LGBT community, dragging the whole thing into the toxic culture war. A pretty awful series of arguments kicked off, with a bunch of blue check weird nerds flooding any discussion to try and protect the CM from being asked about following TERF accounts. And rather than her telling these weird nerds to back off and that no, she doesn’t support TERFs and doesn’t hate the trans community, she just… remained quiet.

So did LRG in general, really. People spent most of that day messaging and tweeting at them to do one thing or another, with some in favor, and some against looking into her, and that after a long, long day, an abrupt, very corporate and wooden message was posted on the LRG twitter as follows.

Then the powder keg exploded. First, her husband made a hastily deleted tweet calling on one of the most bigoted youtubers on the entire platform to cover an “unjust firing” on his youtube channel, pretty much confirming that she had indeed been let go over the backlash. (as well as putting away any doubt that the CM believed in the stuff she was following, since it her husband openly called for one of those individuals she was following to help unfire her somehow)

Then, for some really, really stupid reason, the aftermath of this was the biggest I’ve seen people get publicly mad at LRG until the D 3DO incident (another thing I’ll note later on)… And most of it wasn’t even for what i’d consider a valid reason. Tons of angry alt-righters and reactionary types flooded LRG’s comments, condemning the very corporate statement written and thrown up on their socials without much of a word. Some of the people she was following that caused the concern to begin with, openly caught onto the situation and posted in support of her, in turn sending their thousands upon thousands of bigoted followers on LRG and anyone who remotely supported the idea of giving a Transphobe the boot from a job that again, was selling pro LGBT indie games for years beforehand, and have continued to since this incident. The idiot running the social media website this all took place on even offered to help sue Limited Run over the firing, and led to LRG and their staffers’ twitter accounts getting filled with so many bigoted replies and hate posts it was ridiculous. Think how stupid dumb mad the online right got about Bud Light a couple of years ago, and imagine that locked in on certain employees or anyone who had the company name in their bio; that’s essentially the level of toxicity I witnessed from afar.

To say LRG’s social media feeds were toxic would be an understatement; for a good few weeks, it was directly in the line of fire in the toxic culture war a lot of those reactionary types loved to stoke so much. People got mad at the person who blew the whistle on the CM’s follower list, leading to a bunch of transphobic remarks sent her way to the point she had to leave the entire internet due to constantly being bombarded by transphobia and slurs. Twitter’s new priorities and refusal to take action on blatant transphobia didn’t help either, making the harassment unspeakably bad, and even led to the point of an account who specifically went to every single Tweet mentioning the company in any fashion to deadname the individual who raised awareness of the CM’s conduct, even long after they left the internet due to harassment. Of course, Twitter did nothing if you reported such posts, since their new management stopped giving a single shit about harassment and deadnaming (the old management wasn’t much better at this either)

But wait, the situation gets crazier! While all that rage was going on and reactionary youtube channels rushed to make their lame transphobic videos on why LRG should be boycotted forever and ever for firing a transphobe, and not for the many prior instances of bad QC or other issues like unprofessional CEO/COOs. The now ex-CM, staying mostly quiet during this initial period, got invited onto a National TV News show regarding the situation, by a guy who has recently split one of the US’s main political parties into internet civil war for having a self described Neo Nazi on his podcast.

I will not torment you with the clips or even mention the host’s name, but in her appearance on the show, she seemed pretty reserved from openly getting mad at anyone in particular, and just mostly went along with the guy trying to poke and ask questions about the firing, with him framing it as an attack on free speech and really just having it be another story on his list of bullet points of things to get mad about that night for grandparents to listen to.

However, one extra bit came from the behind the scenes aspect around the show, explaining more about why they got fired with an abrupt, corporate statement; per one of the producers of the show on Twitter, it came to their attention that the Embracer Group was ultimately the one that made the call to let her go and write that statement.

At the time, I poked around my sources hoping for more, and didn’t get too much extra; just a couple of sources alleging the same thing the TV show staffer did, except with them adding how LRG initially planned to shuffle her to another position in the company. Not because they supported her views, since they absolutely did not, but moreso because they hoped for it to quietly blow over as many prior controversies had before. And well, considering how toxic the extreme/absurd backlash to her firing was, I can kinda see their point.

Still, months went by. Nothing related to Limited Run could be mentioned on Twitter without furious people bringing up the CM stuff and getting insanely mad about it. Limited Run even had to lock down their Twitter comments section for months on end, solely because of how unusable and toxic it was. LRG had unintentionally been dragged into the culture war, and their response to it was pretty weak, in my opinion.

My personal frustration with the whole ordeal, was just how quickly Limited Run caved to never vocally supporting LGBT rights in the face of attacks. With how so many of these bad actors are desperate to harm LGBT rights all across the world, and how many other developers have continued their vocal support of LGBT rights even in the face of such challenges (a thing you do before you go ignore the trolls as you should after the fact), the complete silence on LGBT rights ever since the wooden statement, with not a single support message I could find posted from LRG themselves even up to the present day, just felt like the ultimate example of failing the rule of “don’t comply in advance”.

Never any acknowledgment or public support of LGBT from staff. Nothing at all besides the hollow, wooden statement from January they just dropped off and walked away from waiting for it all to blow over, even as many people at the company got death threats and all kinds of harassment hurled their way for having to fire a transphobic individual. The fact you didn’t even see one damn person at the company publicly come out to rebuke such behavior or condemn the slurs being hurled at their own employees and ask them to knock that shit off, was honestly pitiful. They obviously don’t need to be preaching at everyone 24/7 or anything like that, but at the very damn least make a genuine effort to apologize to a community you caused issues with with due to questionable hiring decisions.

Nevertheless, LRG still publishes LGBT themed games and work with plenty of developers in the space to this day, and never stopped in the aftermath of this thankfully, so it’s not like they went back on doing that, but come on! If even Devolver was capable of swiftly and vocally telling off a transphobe on Twitter without shame despite how toxic the site has gotten, Limited Run absolutely had the means to do so, even if it would have been a one and done thing. A megacorp not responding is one thing, but 2023 Limited Run Games was barely that, only just having been bought out by Embracer at that time.

Of course, all of this could have looked very silly if in the end, the CM didn’t end up being a transphobe at all and was indeed, just following too many suspiciously bigoted people for monitoring reasons and was indeed fired unjustly/in a dumb reactionary manner by a mob, but alas, in the aftermath of this whole ordeal, the old CM has since gotten a job with a very far-right company, and has become more and more vocal on social media about pushing against LGBT rights; usually by retweeting anti-trans garbage and posting transphobia a lot more often, pretty much cementing that yes, firing her was the right thing to do, and honestly, it should have been done a hell of a lot sooner with just how mask off she’s been since the departure.

Much to my dismay, that transphobic behavior was always who she was, and I just happened to be fooled by it for so long, as were many in the LRG community, including LGBT fans/buyers who no doubt were watching her early streams during her time with LRG. What a shameful, awful reveal of your true character, and the way LRG handled it by being too cowardly to stand with the LGBT community was weak.

To close this wild, semi-vague ride off, The fact I still see some collectors and certain notable people in the switch/retro game community continue to bitch about the firing and claim it as the sole/biggest injustice the company ever did, is really aggravating to me. Not just due to you know, the stance of opposing the firing/finding it unjust being in support of a transphobe, but also the fact that out of literally all the other fuckups/bad behavior Limited Run has done, especially considering the very recent stuff that I had to delay parts of my article for, the fact they fired an employee who would be fired at most other businesses for the same behavior is where you draw the line? No, seriously. Get a social media community manager job at some local place, and copypaste some of the rhetoric of the transphobic individuals that CM followed; you won’t have that job for long.

I honestly contemplated cutting out this entire ramble since it would otherwise seem outta place and weird to dig up old internet drama, but I decided to keep this in, since the way LRG decided to poorly handle this incident that led to their own employees being harassed by goobergobbers on the internet, is very reflective of how they poorly handle other controversy or QC error in general; hoping you forget and move on. It also comes around full circle when you learn how they did react and counter a certain other online claim, and make you wonder why they didn’t show the same defensiveness when this was all going on.

The Revolving Door and Shipping Queue Woes

Post CM incident, new CMs were hired. It took a bit for them to get a footing, and some would rotate out, but eventually they managed to get a new CM with no risk of being involved in any sort of situation akin to the last major one. I’m keeping their name unrevealed for the sake of their privacy and the fact they play a part of this article later on, but at least from my point of view, they seem fine, if a bit content to give the corporate, wooden statements on status updates and such.

The Limited Run Discord would also go through a bit of a shift after this too; per some of my pals who are still around that place, LRG staffers would largely withdraw and be far, far less active post the CM incident; mods were swift at stomping out any bigotry/rule breaking posts there thankfully, but it was clear the increased toxicity and backlash was too much for a discord server of that size to bear, and so I presume to keep the LRG staff safer from the twitter mob, they backed off from the discord, and eventually had a generic “LRG Customer Relations” person acting as the defacto mod/Q&A answerer. Meaning that in exchange for better safety, the Limited Run Discord got more corporate and, as we’ll see a bit later, lost some of the personal touch that made it so helpful in the early days of the company. There were still named employees working and answering questions in the discord, but they came by a lot less often.

Indeed, that wooden/generic response would apply to answers on their social media and the Limited Run Reddit about their products. The new CM would just answer in a very dull faction, just pointing people towards the website’s product update page for people who wanted to know the new ETA on their endlessly delayed stuff, and LRG was just dealing with the whole Blowout sale they started around the time of the transphobic backlash.

This was when I started hearing reports of a “shipping queue” where products that were in-hand should have shipped out rather quickly, start building up a lot more rapidly than they did before, with in-hand items taking weeks or even months to fulfill; incredibly absurd when holding a sale meant to clear out old warehouse stock and ship those in-hand items out quick (and indeed, a good chunk of that in-hand 2023 sale stuff shipped weeks later, and that does not include the stuff that was supposed to ship out later)

The very first inkling of the shipping queue I heard about was when Press Run launched, an initiative meant to release a new book every month, with the standard edition being in-hand and ready to go out. The first books came, people bought them, and despite the books already existing and shipping to some people pre-release, the LRG shipments were not immediate. Some got them weeks later. Some got them months later. Some had to bug support to push the copy out to them because they legitimately forgot to ship the books out. Some caved and just bought the Amazon edition which shipped more reliably than from LRG themselves.

I was a bit caught off guard with why a company was having such shipping problems with books of all things, but I didn’t think much of it at the time. Unfortunately, it would remain a pretty big issue in 2023, and exploded post the firing of the CM, and even moreso upon some more departures from the company that May, likely due to one of those people being a big factor with shipping and a void needing to be filled afterward.

That person would end up being Douglas Bogart; the same COO I had mentioned in the past two articles and grilled for unprofessional behavior in the aftermath of the Shiren thing and how much he’d pretzel to defend LRG’s past QC mishaps. He announced his departure in May of 2023, and quietly along with them was the new CM who had just joined months prior. LRG seemed to have a backup on the ready though, and since then I haven’t really heard much about their new CM besides well, them being anonymous and hiding behind the usual “Customer Solutions” label. There were still mods on the official Limited Run Reddit running things that were named, but none with as much of an identifier like the prior CMs beforehand.

At the time I did find it very odd how Doug, a guy I knew long enough to know he wouldn’t want to ever leave LRG willingly (and had months before on the CAG forums, pledged to continue working there post buyout), just abruptly left the company, and the CM leaving wasn’t really apparent at the time, and only would make sense to me later. The shipping queue would be a continual thing in the months afterward, and even impacted me at one point when my final pending Limited Run Games order, a vinyl record of PC Engine Valis music, would get stuck as a in-hand item for six weeks before I had to push support to free it from the “shipping queue”.

For a time, this queue issue seemed to have only recently been resolved, with even the longer in-hand holdups lately coming nowhere near as bad as some of the delays (2-4 months!) I saw on the many limprint community pages during late 2023 and early 2024. Sometime in the summer of 2024, it appears whatever was causing this massive strain on their warehouse, finally simmered down. Unfortunately, as of this summer in 2025, it appears reports of in-hand items taking forever did seem to tick back up quite a bit, especially when LRG opened their website vault to drop older in-hand products (replacing the blowout sale of previous years), so whatever “fixed” it last year, appears to no longer be working, and also seems to prove Doug didn’t single-handedly cause whatever problems that queue was having. Either that, or having to ship a bunch of in-hand items again stressed their workload.

It doesn’t appear to be quite as dire as 2023 thankfully, but the in-hand shipping queue times still come off as ridiculous all the same, especially for things they already have stock of. Still, the faster turnaround for standard editions is an overall net positive change since our last piece.

So thus, I got my final Limited Run Games product in summer 2023. I was free of the company, and pretty much motivated to never ever buy from them again, even with Doug no longer involved. I didn’t have much respect for Josh either, and with me going mostly digital/retro collecting in the aftermath of my LRG/Limited Print adventures, I was more than happy to only really use LRG as a highlighter for any indie games I may have not seen on Steam. (Super Sami Roll was one I found out about this way, as one example) But even that use would diminish in the past year, due to some slow changes with what the company would sign and take on due to the growing nature of the business.

All in all, I didn’t really have much to write about in 2023/early 24 even if I wanted to. I could nitpick into every last bit about how they handled the CM situation and how I feel they should have fought harder against the bigots and how I hope they privately gave their employees some kind of protection from dealing with the tidal wave of stupid internet harassment, but with Twitter the way it was, I don’t even know if that would have helped at all; the social media owner being on the edge of joining the fight with litigation probably didn’t help matters either, and the fact all that has finally ended save for weird youtube nerds who still obsess about it and bring it up in comments about anything related to the company (you think I’m obsessed for writing an article i only wrote to end writing about this subject forever? just google any LRG video and dig in the comments, even newer ones will have people complaining about this firing as if it was a crime against humanity), made me pretty adamant about not touching the LRG topic in an article at that point, since it would be making an article for the sake of making an article.

While CEs were indeed still coming with cheap components and inaccurate items, and standard edition Switch games stopped containing manuals consistently, that wasn’t anything new. What you see here, is what the end of the LRG article I originally would have made last year would have likely been, save for even more details on the “fighting transphobia” aspect.

Then, in the summer of 2023, I got a tip from a source. It was about Douglas, and someone else involved with LRG. I was relayed what had happened to him, and some allegations at how LRG was being ran behind the scenes, opening my eyes to some aspects of the company I was uncertain about, along with his general behavior I had dealt with myself.

The Co-Founder of Limited Run Games was actually fired.

Summer/Fall Rumors

With only one of my usual Limprint sources offering some initial info to me in the early part of the Summer, shortly after the departure, I didn’t really comment on it publicly too much. The initial info I had gotten, was that Douglas was fired from Limited Run, against his will, by both Josh and Embracer because he had broken a rule. I had no info on what the rule was, just that whatever it was made him unable to continue working and he had to leave.

Didn’t really think much at the time, and pushed for a bit more, only to get told that pretty much some people at the company had difficulties working with him and he was alleged to have made people there uncomfortable. I figured these might be difficulties akin to what I dealt with during his narcissist Posting Through It moments, but it could just also be a typical “urgh i do not like my boss being pushy” situation, as I couldn’t pinpoint for sure. Would feel a little bad to jump the gun as a result, so I left it there as a thing for me to note down, but still was caught off guard by how a guy notorious for never wanting to leave, ended up being ousted.

Then, while I was lingering on Cheapassgamer more to chat while waiting for that darn aforementioned Valis Vinyl, posting my own speculation on to why he was not at the company anymore (partly from sourced info, partly my own theory) Doug returned from an internet wide absence to deny the fact that he was fired or possibly let go, and insisted he was still great friends with Josh. Everything was absolutely OK, no worries!

I sent this to my source, asking if this aspect was true; why would you still be friends with the guy who fired you, after all? Kinda would make my source pretty shaky and unreliable if Doug was in the right. Then, after a long while of waiting and having it all double checked (since people didn’t want to comment on this dismissal right away, giving me the impression that whatever got him out, was rather big/not a thing they’d rather talk about), I still had yet to hear back, and pretty much moved on as I waited for that darn vinyl. Even I found the whole focus on if Josh or Doug were still friends or not pretty stupid, and openly remarked as such to my source, with me not feeling that was a cause to write an article giving thoughts about what amounted to weird drama.

Thus, I just continued to move on about LRG. Doing my own things, my own reviews, the usual stuff. I wasn’t even on social media outside of Cohost and reddit then, so it was pretty easy to not have to hear about the dude for once. Blissful unawareness, oh how I’d soon miss thee…

2023 would soon end, and right before the start of the new year, Limited Run Games signed on to publish physical editions of Persona 3/4, continuing their partnership with SEGA. Some very huge releases of very big games, ditching the retail market for a direct to online retailer method, with not even a Japanese physical to pick up as an alternative. A huge get for LRG, but also the start of what I consider their most depressing change of the next year…

New Year Revelations + The Reddit Modding War

Shortly after the new year, I started to hear some surprising things from my limprint buying friends; LRG was getting faster at standard editions. People who bought Persona 3 by itself, if it wasn’t sent to that horrid shipping queue, got it in mere months, a far cry from the usual amount of time Switch games took. Then, their usual inventory clearing Blowout Sale was delayed by several months, supposedly to wait until the queue situation was resolved. Not much I really thought of then besides a “oh good, people are getting their games quicker, maybe they learned from the usual MOQ to order a bunch of the games ahead of time and nail that down”. CE still took a while obviously, but they were at least doing somewhat decent monthly digests giving status updates for more recent preorders. Were they finally turning the corner on communication and QC?

Not fully. I still saw plenty of games getting shipped with lackluster looking CE components, or in a more generic clamshell case, a change they made along with the removal of the trading cards specifically to speedup the procedure, but hardly anything that brought to mind the insanely long year+ waits of some of their prior CEs. That didn’t mean some CEs like the Persona ones wouldn’t take that long though, and as of now a few ultra CEs are still in production, though a bunch of the steelbook/smaller CEs did ship out way quicker than I had anticipated, more on that in a bit.

However, one big change would kick in shortly after the new year, that would pretty much be the most controversial change to their website in a long while; Purple Dot. Toted as a way to be more transparent on communication, Purple Dot would give you ETAs, let you cancel super duper easily, and be pretty upfront about the status of your order. This sounded pretty rad, honestly, but immediately people complained about how pre-order items under Purple Dot would no longer function with Paypal, a pretty reliable and popular purchasing method for a lot of people. EU buyers got this functionality reinstated not too long after Purple Dot rolled out, but as of this article’s December 2025 launch, it still appears North American pre-orders do not let you use Paypal even now due to Purple Dot.

Thus, even for a lot of LRG fans, people were stuck without the means to use the usual payment method they trusted, with barely any communication on this aspect, especially with why EU had it working again, but NA did not. My personal hunch on why this is the case, might be just due to EU’s consumer laws; I dunno the specifics, but perhaps they do not allow companies to remove payment methods in such a way, or maybe LRG was able to have the EU help them with whatever snag they had with getting it working with Purple Dot in the region. Still, North America is the bulk of their audience, and you’d think that they’d prioritize Paypal by now… So I’m partly wondering if maybe the Purple Dot company itself doesn’t allow Paypal, and thus the EU exception is due to them being forced to offer that only in those regions.

Either way, we still don’t know why Purple Dot rolled out this way, and this was the most annoying aspect to modern pre-orders from LRG for a lot of people. As for those ETA updates, it would take a few months for those to go into effect, (Since well, they gotta make the product they’re preordering first) and people quickly found trying to add a Purple Dot order with a non purple dot in-hand order, would break the order and cancel it due to Purple Dot outright forbidding usage of Paypal. (since you can use Paypal with in-hand items still) This would create a bit of a mess during blowout sales when people would be more inclined to combine orders unintentionally, but as of late I hear about this not as often, so I wonder if they finally fixed this (or just less people buying an in-hand item with an item they’d have to wait longer for due to the vault being a thing.)

Then, in Late February 2024, seemingly out of the blue, The r/LimitedRun subreddit would be completely banned off of Reddit. It would come back a week later, with changes that made the usual mod staff there not stick around in favor of the same, corporate and faceless “LRG Customer Solutions” account that had made their Discord devoid of the past personalities the company provided for support purposes. At a glance, it looked like maybe someone broke a big rule, Reddit as a whole got involved, and then LRG changed their modding procedure to abide by the guidelines, so I just thought of it as something rather amusing over an actually important event.

Then I was tipped off. Someone I had seen around on Limited Print reddits and thus was familiar with, had been offered by a mysterious account to mod the LRG reddit, right before the subreddit ban, post the takeover due to said account wanting to “give it back to the community”. Said individual took the offer, quickly checked the mod logs out of curiosity, and then found out what was really going on before relaying it to me, which now you get to see as well.

Yep, Ex-COO Douglas Bogart had somehow seized control of the subreddit by compromising the main LRG reddit account, banning everyone else LRG related from it, and then tried giving mod permissions to random users, offering roles to them under a sockpuppet account, “LimitedRunReddit” that he instated himself. This was really wild, and at the time to me it felt a bit out of nowhere; not having paid attention to Doug since I saw that forum remark and largely forgot about it, I didn’t think of him as the kind of guy who’d try to coup something an old company was in charge of that barely had much notable activity to begin with, (most of the posts on the LR reddit were questions about orders or QC complaints, nothing really special going on there, and the sub mods didn’t even delete many critiques unless they were absolutely insane posts with personal attacks) but lo and behold, he really did go out and do that, which drew more attention to the LRG reddit situation than beforehand.

Needless to say, LRG finally got back control of the reddit at the start of March, presumably with help of Reddit admins, reverting moderation back to normal and installing the CS account in the process, and swiftly banning Doug from the reddit. Almost certainly as a result, Doug’s original Twitter account would soon be permanently banned, with his new account revealing the reason was for trademark abuse (due to not being employed by LRG anymore, yet having it as part of his social media brand, he didn’t own Limited Run as a name)

Gee, I wonder why logging into a company you don’t work for anymore and trying to screw with their social media would have them wanting you to not use their name anymore! Regardless, this weird turn of events led me to pondering as to why Doug would suddenly do something like this to his own, ex company.

This whole ordeal confused me a little bit, with why he’d try to take over a random subreddit and seemingly try to “free it” from the company he cofounded. Only to be then be reminded by my source yet again that Doug allegedly did not leave Limited Run Games of his own accord, which added an extra layer to the puzzle. What seemed like a plausible retirement or disagreement with a publicly stubborn CEO, might be for some completely different reasons. Or perhaps it was just his way of venting as part of his retirement?

But then roughly a year later, he un-retired.

The New Limprint Company, Rock-It Games

Days into March, a press release came out announcing a brand new company was set up for the sake of publishing Limited Print titles for Playstation and Nintendo consoles. Rock-It Games, headed by Michael Devine of 3DO and Ziggurat fame, along with Douglas Bogart as a game curator, pledged to be yet another online retailer putting together physical versions of popular Indie games, while also choosing some to publish digitally on several platforms, such as Space Invaders Deck Commander, a card game take on Taito’s hit IP, and Spooky’s Jumpscare Mansion HD Renovation, a console version of a semi-popular Steam title. They also pledged to publish around ten games for 2024, with a total of 15 games numbered out in this initial press release. Most non LRG companies these days usually go for one game a month max, so it was pretty bold to see a big number right up front, indicating the startup had pretty big ambitions for success and helping out indies.

Except that would not be the case, since as of the time I’m wrapping this article, they’ve only published five games for their website: Spooky’s Jumpscare Mansion, Digital Eclipse’s Volgar the Viking II, The Smile Alchemist from Kemco, Real Heroes: Firefighter HD from Ziggurat and an HD Remaster of Argonaut Games’ Croc platformer. Several of these showed up on amazon first, and are actually finished in production, making those two the first Rock-It titles to become real. tangible items you can go buy, and Volgar II is on the verge of shipping as I wrap this article. (and might already be out by the time you read this)

Digitally, Rock-It only published an early access Steam version of Space Invaders Deck Commander in the earlier part of January, along with a more recent retro compilation pair of Jaleco’s Bases Loaded and Goal series. Not really a robust output so far, with Croc’s announcement being the only one I’ve seen get some sort of wide recognition and support, yet not a lot of talk about purchasing the physical, nor the one for Volgarr. Part of this is pretty likely due to general Limited Print fatigue and the boom being long over, but another likely reason has to do with how they not only pledge to put all these games out at Retail (meaning they aren’t exclusive to the website, a pretty good move), but to give frequent status updates as needed.

Just one problem. Their first game, Spooky’s HD? Quietly canceled in a social media post mere months ago, after people in Limited Print collecting spaces started getting cancelation emails. For a good while, nobody even knew this game was getting canceled and some have even pointed out they never got an email about the cancelation, just a silent refund in their credit card account.

This is despite putting up preorders for the standard edition and the CE for it, and thus meant as of the time of this posting, Rock-It Games have only done limprint style preorders for three games, a far cry from the ten they announced at the PR they unveiled, with one of those now being canceled. At the very least their April production update seems to indicate the two games in the pipeline are moving along OK production wise, but needless to say their bold ambitions of tons of physical games have amounted to only five games in production after two years.

I will also give credit where due that after Croc’s weird Platinum Trophy SKU came out, updates on that title were more reasonable for the time (though people on their socials still are cranky about it due to uncertain communication, even if I at least feel like it doesn’t seem to be in much danger), and in a bizarre twist of fate, Rock-It are now the company publishing a collector edition for Marvel Cosmic Invasion. Yes, the followup to the TMNT brawler LRG made a bajillion SKUs for, now not at LRG. It also appears their limprint style model is slowly being backed away from in favor of that only being for Collector Editions, with Rock-It appearing to transition more towards yet another third party publishing label, a better move than diving fully into Limprint and risking becoming a Dispatch Games 2.0.

However, before we dive into just why or how this limprint startup would cancel their first game, or why it even matters for me to mention them, we need to return back to where we left off before we stick around in 2025 too long, to around April of 2024, back to the Limited Run Games side of this card, since even post Doug, LRG was still having plenty of issues despite their shipping queue slowly normalizing itself around this time, and soon their biggest, actual PR crisis in what I argue might just be since their company inception would take place would happen when it came to a small game they threw up for preorder in 2023. A 3DO pressing of the hit horror game D. And more importantly, it would also flat out disprove Doug was the lone problem with the company and him being ousted would magically improve everything. (a fact I foolishly believed for a bit, too, due to my own problems noted in the prior LRG pieces)

D is for CD-isaster-R

I have never played Keiji Eno’s D, and didn’t know much about it myself until this whole incident. Unsurprisingly, I also do not own a 3DO, nor know that many people who do, so I was a bit stunned when LRG put up D for 3DO as one of their big LRG3 announcements one year, and even got it put up on the site for preorders in 2023. Despite how a lot of stuff doesn’t really hit MOQ nowadays for LRG out of the really big titles, (a situation that extends to even the Switch’s MOQ these days, from what a source has told me about their general sales, hence new partnerships with stores like VideoGamesPlus and the like and why it seems like some LRG games just never, ever sell out there) retro reissues don’t usually have this same sort of situation, with a much lower MOQ than the 5K LRG usually has to contend with for a Switch title and more flexibility to help the niche audiences.

It also helps that their usual provider of reissued games, Retro-Bit, actually makes incredibly high quality cartridges and have gone through their own turnaround on Quality Control, going from making very shitty plug and play multi-game systems that you could probably snap in half with your bare hands, to some of the best, most sturdy SNES/Genesis/NES cartridges on the market that I genuinely still get a kick out of buying whenever I can; if anything, they’re the only “limited print” thing I still get, albeit from Castlemania/Rondo now. Thus, for those consoles LRG using Retro-Bit as a supplier meant it was a pretty safe bet buying one of those reissue carts was gonna turn out fine for your system, and far superior to the shoddy Columbus Circle reissues going on in Japan which could damage your systems due to bad cartridge edges.

Still, a 3DO reissue? Shoot, I knew their PC sales never were that good, but how good would a 3DO game do? Surprisingly, the rough numbers I was given estimates of for this reissue indicates it at least did far better than my Shiren PC box, and better than most PC LRG releases. (which have now moved to this weird USB stick method with some files slapped on; pretty cheap, but more effective as a preservation tool than a code in a case or a CD that might not fit in modern computers, since you can just copy the contents onto anything you want). Somewhere around 1K units is what I was given an estimate of.

This likely was due to the 3DO game’s cult popularity along with the novelty of owning a new, branded 3DO game in 2024; yes, LRG even went outta their way to get the system branding. Piko’s Eye of Typhoon was given a 3DO release via Limited Run a few years beforehand, but it was a distribution title and not something Limited Run made in house. Early in April 2024, another preorder would go live for Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties, the weird FMV game LRG fully owns the copyright to (because of course LRG would buy up such a thing), which was yet another 3DO printing on disc!

It seemed the obscure console would join LRG’s retro catalog before the previously announced and forever delayed reprint of Rondo of Blood for the Turbo Duo would (And despite my many article delays, Rondo of Blood on the Duo still is not officially dated, detailed, or out in any way, shape or form, leaving a more appealing retro reissue, also with official Turbo Duo branding, fully MIA), and with D set to arrive at the end of April 2024, this would be just another console in the lineup of stuff Limited Run would, for their credit, put out intriguing retro reissues for.

I mean hey, a cheaper way to play Dragon View, Snow Bros MD or Worms Armageddon on your retro console is a pretty neat thing to see, especially with the well-made cartridges from Retro Bit, which thus leads to these retro reissues usually not having much, if any QC issues I can note. The S.C.A.T AVS error I noted in my previous article was the only time where the cartridge itself caused any issues with accurate hardware, as far as I can tell, and even then it seems to play better on the actual NES.

Unfortunately, the landing of these 3DO discs did not go smoothly at all. In early May, people started receiving their copies, and immediately customers who inspected the discs on their computer found that all D discs save for the soundtrack CD were pressed on CD-Rs. Companies using -R discs weren’t too uncommon for some DVD reissues from say, Warner Bros for a certain period of time, but they still are far, far from optimal especially considering at no point was any indication given that D would be shipped on such fragile media. It also doesn’t help the 3DO is notoriously bad at reading CD-Rs, with some models refusing to play the D disc whatsoever, a clear sign of barely any QC/awareness of how 3DOs actually work whatsoever, and no real acknowledgement of how bad this mistake was before sending the games to customers. Just get the copies in, ship them out, same as usual.

Needless to say, like with Shiren, impacted people were rightfully pissed, but on a way bigger scale, with the video I embedded above being a pretty clear indicator of the initial reaction. Shiren and LRG was a case where only under 100 people got impacted (and as of now, I believe I’m the only one to have written about that fiasco at all in 2025 with this article bringing it back up again), but D had hundreds more and was for a more popular game that was a cult classic for its original source console. It also was for a group of customers that quite frankly, would be die-hard enough to look into all the aspects of the release as soon as they got it, so what the hell was Limited Run thinking?

It even got so publicly bad that even other big outlets that didn’t normally cover LRG’s mistakes or missteps wrote articles on the matter and reached out for comment, but outside of a boilerplate pledge to immediately work on a solution to replace the CD-R copies for customers and refund them, the closest to some kind of non-wooden statement was one Bob from RetroRGB received, where Josh replied to him in an email noting they had to go this route due to failing to hit the Minimum Order Quantity, along with it being pretty difficult to accurately make 3DO games to begin with.

Needless to say, while I’m glad they auto contacted and refunded everyone this time around, this was yet another case of them being made to do so mostly due to backlash. This wasn’t too surprising to me due to how the whole Shiren thing turned out in a similar way, but even I was a bit surprised by just how big the backlash could be over a 3DO game, and I didn’t really expect much of a resolution besides quietly canceling the pressed discs or sending them without much of a commotion.

Thankfully, months later Limited Run did send replacement copies, properly pressed and working on all kinds of 3DO models, so hey, at least this D situation was stopped pretty swiftly, even if just like with Shiren, it absolutely, never ever should have happened to begin with, and I was hopeful this would be the end of Limited Run cutting corners due to low sales or changed product situations, since it’s pretty blatant at this point how selling to collectors will just make it harder to cover anything whenever you mess up. The good news is the company that did make the proper versions of D for LRG is doing their own set of 3DO releases for other games, that actually work on all models. Maybe next time, don’t use the most popular game on a niche system as a testing ground for a rushjob!

LRG may have gone more corporate on the Reddit by this point, (switching to their Customer Solutions account they used mostly for their Discord, which is equally robotic) but I’ll also at the very least give them an awful lot of credit for not just immediately deleting any trace of this controversy being brought up there, provided it wasn’t just people cursing their heads off; they could have very easily gone the cover-up way and tried to shut down all bad feedback due to how much bigger the backlash was this time around, but they still managed to at least fess up and ultimately do the right thing, and somehow managed to pull themselves out of the worst QC mess ever done to their products to date. That being said, later bits of allegations would lead to this situation getting a bit murkier yet again, and made it blatantly obvious just how much LRG and its management do not care and only do if they get caught with something.

Speedier Queues, Simpler Routines, losing the Indie Touch

Post D, during the whole situtation where those buyers were waiting for their discs, and before I’d end up making the Ko-Fi that sparked this article you’re reading right now, how did LRG handle their messy shipping queue? Well, by June 2024, complaints on stuff lingering forever seemed to go way down in the circles I was in. Them delaying their big blowout sale to the summer seems to have actually helped clear the warehouse up enough that them getting games in-hand didn’t mean you might have to wait six friggin weeks for it.

Some people were now getting games around the same time or before LRG’s partners at VGP were, and with VGP being a pretty stable way to get LRG games past their pre-order period, you could argue you didn’t even need to order through LRG if you just wanted the standard editions. If you want to right now, you can even go to VideoGamesPlus and pick out any LRG game they have and cut LRG out entirely, which is how most of my collecting pals have done since a few years ago. The days of a new LRG title selling out in 2 minutes were long over, and that’s better for everyone I feel.

The Purple Dot shipping estimates, as incredibly stupid as it is that American customers still cannot buy pre-orders via Paypal, are generally accurate and update people with notices of a delay if anything shifts with an automatic email. Some of my friends preordered the Shantae GBA game over a year ago, and have gotten the new ETAs of the subsequent delays for the cartridge on time, even if sadly LRG still continues to not give the right amount of detail on murky information when needed. Alas, you still won’t get details on why X thing got delayed or what component is holding up which part of the process, just another bump or delay.

That’s not even beginning to touch on the other unanswered questions regarding previously announced, yet swept under the rug Limited Run announcements. Will the full set Vita game (Bird King) ever come out, or was that a complete lie they’ll dodge accountability on for the few madmen that bought them all from LRG? (Update: right before I published this article, Josh finally commented on it, indicating there’ll be a plan for it “soon”, mostly after being bugged on Twitter over it due to Vita copies showing up on eBay all of a sudden from North Carolina. I’m sure that isn’t suspicious at all. With recent events taking place, I don’t think this will actually happen, though) Will Rondo of Blood’s english Turbo Duo release ever show up, or did Konami catch wind of their CD-R shenanigans and realize it wasn’t practical? Will any uncertain info on a LRG product be fully accurate before it actually ships to people? Sure, stuff is subject to change, but to that degree?

Hell, as I was starting to write this, people got rightfully annoyed that Josh posted on Twitter how the Tomba physical would have all current patches included, meaning it would fix a bunch of Switch crashing bugs and some PS5 trophy bugs, only for the physical to arrive in people’s hands and for that to be a complete lie, with nobody at LRG willing to comment on the matter, so they still are really poor at communicating their product information. Funnily enough, the recent VideoGamesPlus exclusive PS4 version of the game did have those fixes on the disc, since that version came later.

Shortly after Tomba backlash (and probably just due to the toxicity and horrid nature of Twitter nowadays), Josh had stopped posting on his personal Twitter account in favor of Linkedin.

Considering how I’ve heard allegations of even LRG staff getting annoyed at Josh/Doug’s social media habits as far back as the Shiren incident, (with me being explicitly told that some then-staff told both of them to stop being fixated on replying online to people, and just got ignored constantly) I was honestly surprised someone finally managed to reign him in on this. It doesn’t seem to have worked forever, since he went back to posting on Twitter again, as evidenced by his recent remarks on Bird King, but with the very recent news of him stepping down, he’s off social media for a break now. Nothing too crazy seemed to be happening on his socials though up to his stepping down though, which is at least nice that he didn’t go the Doug route.

I will at least say for customers though, they’ve gotten better with putting out standard editions of modern titles out, even for Switch. Seems being able to guesstimate the right amount of copies to order for a game means LRG could just order MOQ ahead of time, then put up the pre-order closer to when it arrives, and bam, you have customers getting their games in a pretty sweet amount of time with decent accuracy on shipping timelines, as it should be.

(Of course, big CEs and ultra CEs are still the usual year+ affairs, but they at least seem to do way less of the latter than they used to, a good move considering potential tariffs, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some unexplained delays that make little to no sense, nor a crapton of SKUs per month… Despite many, many, many promises to “slow down” that only just barely seem to be getting traction.)

Nearing the end of last summer, I saw LRG as pretty much their usual self, maybe with a bit of bumps in the road fixed due to the embracer buyout. An automated new shipping service, (that still blocks Paypal in the year 2025, if not likely 2026 as well) pretty much worry-free ordering if you just nab a standard edition when you feel like it, and still next to no proper communication if you happen to be waiting on a SNES copy of Worms or some CE that is taking a bajillion years.

(Author note: As I was finally finishing the first full draft of this article, in mid October 2025, Worms for SNES finally shipped, years later. I think it may have even been up for preorder when my last LRG piece was made, if you want an indication of how stupidly long it’s been. They did at least make people know they had to do a lot of work on the ROM due to the weird PAL nature of it all, so that’s more transparency than some of their other super-duper long delayed titles)

But then, weeks after beginning to draft this article and having the end point be here, with me pointing out that don’t ever expect QC checks or any sort of consistent quality from anything that isn’t a safe standard edition of a modern console game, something broke in the Limprint sphere, and only managed to stay around for discussion due to the hindsight of someone capturing it on the wayback machine, and an article (temporarily) being written about it.

Then a whole lot of weird shit happened. And it made me honestly uncertain how the heck this company is gonna even maintain itself forever.

ACT II: WEIRD MOVES AND REPLACING THIRD PARTY RETAIL

The Medium Message

Originally I had planned to end this piece a bit earlier, right around when we mentioned the D incident. They were doing monthly digests, they were announcing weird shit but still stuff I guess collectors would like such as Wolfenstein II on Switch, but on a bigger cartridge this time around (Why can’t Microsoft, super rich company, just do that instead? Is Copilot secretly making them too broke for Switch games?) but then out of nowhere in late august, an article dropped from Douglas Bogart himself with a lot of pretty bold accusations against his former employer.

When I woke up to have the archived Medium piece sent to my DMs by a source (it was deleted shortly after being published, but someone threw it up on the Internet Archive early in the morning), I gave it a look and pretty much assumed it would be a usual gaslighting/blame game sort of deal. After all, I’d known and witnessed Doug to just constantly complain anytime someone was remotely critical of him or pushed him away for something, so it could have easily been a “everything bad at LRG was not my fault ever and I was the secret noble hero” manifesto to easily ignore. I literally went into how bad his Reddit AMA ended up with him constantly deflecting blame in my last piece, and there’s a reason I’ve dogged on him a lot in these three articles for his public conduct as a COO who was Very Online, and why I refuse to publicly accept his many attempts at an apology for not being sincere, especially with multiple sources throughout the years advising me to not do so and to avoid contact. There are reasons I could go into on why, but I’m not at liberty to speak to them.

Yet a few details in this blog… did match some stuff I had heard my sources alleged in the past. Stuff that nobody except people who were actually at the company or knew someone working there would even be able to know. With certain elements sticking out enough I felt safe highlighting them, I posted the archived medium link sent to me, and shared it on my Bluesky to note to people how a couple of tidbits of it did match what I heard.

It even got to the point of a certain british tabloid gaming website picking it up to cover in a full article… only for them quietly delete it earlier in 2025 without explanation, and boy, do I have thoughts on that later on. Here’s the article from said tabloid I will not name in this paragraph text, but you’ll learn why I call them that later on, since they didn’t want you to see this anymore.

Anyhow, in said article, Douglas noted that he was in the room when Josh was planning to reissue several games on CD-R as a cost cutting measure, and despite multiple staff telling him no, that was a very bad idea, Josh just shrugged it off and went ahead with it anyway saying nobody would notice. I wouldn’t even need a god damn source to guess this bit is likely true, since Shiren on PC proved it outright. The whole Monkey Island thing that went very under the radar, was also what I assumed the CD-R thing was referring to here, perhaps with Josh wanting them more for replacement copy purposes than the main print..

For most of the medium piece though, it does paint Josh as a pretty blatant narcissist, with Doug noting that their friendship had gone on for twenty four years before it started to show some cracks and fall apart completely. I’ve seen some dismiss the piece entirely because of the whole “well duh, if you knew he was a bad guy, you should have gotten out sooner, stupid fucking idiot” mindset a lot of people have when it comes to hearing about bad relationships, but as one who had personally dealt with narcissistic abuse in my birth family, some of the manipulation described in the piece is 100% akin the behavior of the ones I had to struggle with growing up.

The sudden gaslighting, DARVO, forgiveness for if they mess up or upset you, only to do it again, and again, and again. It all feels like a psychological warfare game and some people are in relationships with a narcissist for a very long time, and some will never even admit their lover/friend/family member is one even if they’re outright diagnosed as such. It really ends up being a bit of a mind game in a lot of cases that can stress and break even the most cautious people. More likely than not, you, reader reading this, have known someone with a narcissist in their life.

You could even argue The United States of America, the country in which I am writing this piece in, has had to fight a narcissist for over a decade now, and if you’ve wondered why some people will never accept any other answer on their idol/friend being a bad person until they are personally affected and learn the hard way, well, that’s how it ends in some cases.

I can’t vouch for specifics in that ramble about Josh’s behavior to Doug (I was not there, I am not a God or fly on the wall), but the sort of manipulation discussed does match how being with an actual IRL narcissist can be like from my own lived experience; always them, never you, unless they can use you to boast about how great you are because of their help before throwing you under the bus the minute everyone else looks away.

This particular paragraph I found most telling, and was how I knew for certain this writeup had a truth shard embedded in it and I could not just dismiss the article, I had to share it on my Bluesky; “The competition stuff even went to competitors. He would constantly be upset if someone like iam8bit signed a game that he wanted. He would tell us all to not like competitors and build the idea that all games should be done by us and that we were the best. It would be frustrating because he would bad mouth Jon Gibson of iam8bit online during an event I was actively talking to Jon at, so then Jon would accuse me of setting him up and lying to him. He made me feel like I shouldn’t take to other people and that made me develop bad habits too.”

I had been made aware years before this info went public pretty confidently that LRG and Iam8bit did not get along well. It wasn’t especially obvious in public, but there had been some crumbs and bits of into to indicate to me how they did not get along at all. And you might be going “but Connor, competitors are supposed to be fierce and hate each other!”, but I just say no, not exactly. One of my biggest mistakes I did immediately after the Shiren incident was an inaccurate belief in how all the limprints must be in some sort of group chat colluding on how to make customers the most annoyed and shittalk them, yet that just was not the case at all.

If anything, some of the limprint owners get along well with others are friends, which is why sometimes you see record labels for VGM partner up with one another especially if it helps with distribution in overseas region one store might not be able to work with. There have also been staffing transfers between limprints, with Doug’s transfer to Rock-It being one example, along with a Collector for Premium Edition Games moving to LRG.

I also was pretty confident this description of Josh’s jealousy of other Limprints to be true, since in our last piece we literally showcased an incident in which Josh publicly gave a snarky response at a pretty mild joke from Signature Edition, prompting them to make a weird apology. For the record, it was about how their edition would likely ship before LRG’s CEs, and well, Signature was correct on that front. Jab or not, that brief bit of public frustration and the stuff I heard about their dislike of 8Bit did make me ponder, and with this bit from the writeup I’m fairly confident Josh isn’t particularly fond of competitors. LRG was (almost) the first, damn it! (As Doug noted in the article, VBlank is technically the first PS4 publisher to come up with a Limprint, direct from website ordering model)

The next striking piece of info to me was a remark from Doug about Josh and how he would handle controversies, which matched 100% what a source said about Shiren to me waaaaay back in 2021. “Whenever there was a possible PR disaster and a way to avoid it he wouldn’t listen. A crappy internal saying was “it’s good enough” if we could save money and cut corners then it was okay if it was passable and just pray no one took a hard look. No one can tell him anything unless you somehow convince him it’s his idea. Tasks used to not get done at work for the longest time because he refused to relinquish control. He taught that behavior to a lot of us too.“

That last bit matched what I was told by multiple people as far back as 2021. Stubbornness from the top, prevented people with ideas near the bottom from actually contributing said ideas to make products the best they can be and avoid causing a controversial mess. If Josh and Doug were warned “hey, this shit may backfire, do not do it”, he just ignored it until it blew up in his face and forced him to cave. Even then, it wasn’t enough for him to fully take accountability, as I witnessed first hand with Shiren. May I remind you all, that Josh’s initial course of action outside of an apology was to ask me to delete my tweets on the matter because it made his company look bad, and being genuinely confused as to why I would be so pissed about not getting what I paid for.

So this being apparently the case with D, and any future incident that would make you go “why wasn’t that checked earlier”, makes it abundantly clear that yes, they seriously do not care about quality control unless it’s either A: a super popular game they know they’ll get flamed over if they fuck it up, so if an error did happen they’d immediately notify to correct it (hence why you probably won’t have major issues with their Persona stuff, but might with whatever random CE for a more niche title would) or B: it’s something so easy they might as well not cut corners.

Now, does this mean Douglas is a perfectly noble, honest man who did nothing wrong and is not partly responsible for any of the issues I brought up in the past three articles, and that there’s no shot he was dismissed for any valid reason? No, no it doesn’t! Josh is pretty blatantly narcissistic, albeit not publicly apparent as such, but that doesn’t magically mean Doug badly communicating to customers, getting into petty fights online, covering and backing up Josh for years and years and years, and not taking no for an answer when DMing people on helping their orders or other factors was A-OK.

I have not been the only one in this industry to find issues with his conduct, and while making this piece even after throwing out a dubious source, I became aware of more than one other person who had not-great experiences with him during his time at LRG, or even his newer time at Rock-It games. There have been indie devs who have outright blacklisted the dude and warn people to stay away from him (same goes for Josh), and the reasonings why is for those individuals to tell when they’re ready to do so, and not my place for that. At the very least though, I can see where the rot he has comes from due to this medium piece, and it’s pretty much the upper two at this point, with the whole “He taught that behavior to a lot of us too,” part.

Part of me gets the sense Doug still wants to have some involvement in limprint, which is why he went off and helped start another company, only for that company to run into similar problems to LRG (though as of now, it just seems to be transitioning more into another third party publisher ala PM Studios, so I don’t think it’ll end up having those issues for long and will just be yet another publisher at the end of the day, at least making it more stable than some limprints like SLG or FPG by miles.). He may have tried couping the subreddit for the sake of “giving it back to the community”, but it is of my belief he wouldn’t even be realizing all this and posting about LRG or Josh like this, if he hadn’t been booted by Josh and Embracer after some kind of investigation. If he was still COO and he and Josh still got along together, I’d expect him to be covering for Josh and doing the same shit as he’s always done as long as he had his comfy position and a bag.

The whole thing gave similar vibes to when the current US president throws someone terrible (but not as terrible as the president) aside, and said person magically starts talking as if yes they actually knew all along he was a bad guy but they were the hero fighting from the inside trying to be the voice of reason, instead of confessing to also being partially complicit and having legitimate remorse, too. The fact in said Medium article he still somehow wants to be Josh’s friend after all that has happened and him just starting to catch onto how a narcissist behaves just really screams of Stockholm Syndrome to me. Welcome to the club, just be glad it wasn’t with a birth relative like I have to deal with, and maybe also reflect on your own behavior too, since your rebrand attempt is kinda silly.

This is where if I was another website, I’d say I reached out to Doug for comment, but during the course of the article multiple sources explicitly warned me to not contact him, as they did for Josh himself as well, and I have a pretty good feeling how that is because neither person is really trustworthy or willing to do anything besides a softball, manipulated interview, and how other instances of trying to get them to answer tough questions often go completely unanswered. There are grams of truth in this piece I can confidently verify, but for the rest of the allegations he discussed I did not mention, that’s up for you to decide on your own, since that’s all just alleged stuff I have no way or interest in verifying.

He did certainly try to reach out to me though; shortly upon me getting funding for this article’s stretch goal on my Ko-Fi thanks to a family friend, he too tried to (badly) make an anonymous contribution to hit the goal again, only to accidentally out himself as the donator due to Paypal tending to do that if you aren’t careful.

If he had been the lone donator that made this article possible and the Ko-Fi wasn’t already at the goal amount before he sent the $100 (due to my IRL friend doing the work shortly after I launched the Ko-fi), I would have sent the money right back to him immediately. But otherwise with it already funded and him having sent it, it made for some nice grocery money, so thanks.

Still, whether it was a means to make me write this article favoring him strictly over Josh or whatnot, it wasn’t gonna work, as in my humble view both are responsible for LRG’s misgivings in their own ways, as it was very clear the rot comes from the top.

Lack of Updates and Weirdness

For most of the rest of 2025, I continued to write the article now and again, although incidents from last fall well, made it pretty hard for me to get the focus to finish the skeleton of this piece. I reached out to some industry people for their input, and it was as I was rambling on Bsky one day about how this piece was in the works when I suddenly got an out of the blue email from someone wanting to be a newer source.

They weren’t exactly someone I wanted to hear from since they were adjacent to someone on my Do Not Contact recommendations from other sources, but they seemed close enough to the top of things to maybe clear up some questions and answer a few things I had in mind, on the condition I instructed them on how I wouldn’t have to edit my article over it and would not lose the editorial independence I maintain for SFG. I was gonna write whatever I was gonna write regardless of how the questions were answered.

A few of these questions were just random things I wanted to know for the heck of it, and a few were things I deliberately asked as trick questions I knew the answers to already; mainly in a way that I could prove if the person was truthful or not based on how future events would play out that would be very easy to observe. A bunch of the answers I got back in response were about Doug and his new company, Rock-It, and how their first game got canceled. OK, except I was already on the path to asking about that for this article and had a more reliable source telling me about how that went down before that got answered (short version: very sloppily, not well, and pretty terribly with a poor IRL experience; another in the whole “they can describe their experience and alleged conduct they witnessed when they choose to”), so that wasn’t 100% new info.

What I did hear back on stuff like why LRG didn’t publicly pledge their support for the LGBT community, or why they seem adverse to supporting good causes, was pretty weak. Mostly stemming down to “well they don’t feel like making a big public deal out of it”. Considering the company cowered into hiding the minute they did anything resembling standing up for LGBT people (by firing a bigoted manager), I didn’t exactly buy this all that much, but I was able to find at least some examples of LRG or Josh himself supporting some real charitable causes.

But the most telling answer I got to one of my trap questions was on Quality Control. Why was it so bad, was it actually gonna improve, and who/what was responsible for all the errors? I was pretty much just told Doug was why and that Embracer’s new COO was coming in to fix everything and make things much smoother now that Doug wasn’t messing up shipping, so thus Doug was truly, certainly, the lone instigator of all the woes. Rest assured, with Doug out that magically makes everything better, as it wasn’t like there’s a work culture or shipping staff that needs to be trained and in a good work environment for shipping to also improve; no, it was all Doug. Doug is clearly Mr Shipping and Mr Ordering Components from Overseas and Checking Them Over. Small Indie Company.

Uh-uh. Totally not trying to be all one-sided and lure me over because of my previous public spats with him. Look, Doug may be someone I have plenty of valid reason to dislike as much, if not slightly more than Josh, for reasons far beyond what I’m willing to put in this article, but even I knew that one singular person couldn’t be why all that shipping queue nonsense was taking place; it was due to the structure of it all, and no doubt due to the pretty tense environments for working.

As of now, I have not been able to get anything concrete on how LRG’s workflow is or how they treat their rank and file employees from my own sources, but from snippets seen in the background of their own videos they or their documentary-creating employee Jeremy Parish have uploaded, that warehouse appears to be pretty darn massive, and something that was quite expensive to build.

An in-hand item sitting in a warehouse with that much space for months on end, let alone thousands of them, is really not excusable and just made that whole queue arc feel more like “fuck, we don’t know how to organize properly, let’s just fiddle around until we can figure out how to ship stuff faster”. I feel something must have improved slightly since standard editions get out reasonably now, but even then you’ll still see people on the reddit more and more frequently point to in-hand book or vault purchases as taking unusually long to ship out, while you could just go to Videogamesplus and buy a LRG product they bought and have it in your hands in a week. VGP also has a pretty big warehouse system and have to deal with US tariff nonsense on top, so if they’re still able to handle this better than LRG has, that’s just on LRG for being a bit slow. It also doesn’t help that during the worst of LRG’s shipping queue woes, VGP would get their inventory before customers would even get a shipping label emailed to them!

Anyhow, months after those questions got answered, a new product, released and put up on the site after Doug had left arrived in the hands of customers. It was a plush of Tomba from the aforementioned game, and they all looked wildly off-render and as if Maximillion Pegasus from Yu-Gi-Oh had stolen their soul.

“Improved quality control” indeed, comparing a listing with the render and the actual product. This pretty much revealed to me that no, it wasn’t just Doug being an idiot for why stuff would come in wildly wrong or have weird errors, it was due to a cost cutting culture… that Doug himself confessed to being there (Albeit clearly because he was mad at getting shown the door). And that was made apparent years before that medium article. This was not at all a surprise to me.

Thus, that potential source became one I grew to find distrust in and would quietly dismiss and grow suspicious of, and just kept working on my piece as normal, slowly working away at it while I did other things throughout 2025. I’d observe Rock-It from a distance too to see how they were shaping up, but with them not putting out anything whatsoever until very recently, that wasn’t much of a hard task. It also became apparent the “monthly digests” LRG touted as communicative status updates just went dormant, and as of now there hasn’t been one since July 2024. Yes, this entire article, delays and all, came out before they put something resembling a public general status update out again.

Still, it was apparent that Embracer was getting more involved with LRG; bigger games were getting signed, Embracer subsidiaries got CEs via LRG like the Tomb Raider and Legacy of Kain remasters, and Clear River Games started outright publishing EU versions of some of their games for the retail market over there, in effect making them the pseudo LRG Europe that was infinitely promised, but never delivered. And Clear River’s warehouse/shipping routine was infinitely faster and better than LRG’s even with their much smaller size, with most people I know who bought from their store seeming much happier with the whole process. They also were doing an extreme amount of Sega Dreamcast merch, indicating their partnership with Sega from the Persona titles wasn’t just a one-off thing. Yakuza, Valkyria Chronicles, and Super CEs for Raidou and Sonic games all would come out over the past year.

Thus, that leads to the last bit of 2024, and more or less how 2025 indicated a new direction that I found to be silly and damaging to not just limited print titles, but collecting/retail as a whole.

Conflicts of Interest, “Access” Journalism, and Fried 8-Bit

Before we get into the bulk of this section, I need to discuss a thing SFG has dealt with off and on, and why I don’t normally do what other companies or sites tend to do with interviews. Sometimes when reviewing a game or interviewing someone, and you happen to say something they really don’t like, you might get removed from their press pool.

Obviously, nobody wants to be removed from a PR list if you did something stupid on accident or said something you didn’t mean that was taken the wrong way. But on the other hand, PR access is a privilege, not a right. If you still want to cover a game you can’t have given to you, just go and buy it. Obviously that is not practical and on SFG if I bought every single game I ever wanted to review I’d be buried in debt, so I do tend to focus on review copies, even if I do break that boundary with non-review copy games like say, the Jalecolle stuff. I’m glad most companies are forgiving and I do my best as a solo-website owner to be honest and clear up stuff when I can if a PR rep has questions.

But there’s been a growing nuisance in the gaming space for a long while now, both when it comes to small-medium sized websites and online content creators, and that’s how much they crave Access Journalism. These people need that connection at all costs. They need to get the next review copy early or interview opportunity in order to make view number go up and hype their audience. Sometimes they might even try to use affiliate links to profit off of said relationships.

So when a site critiques a company, immediately gets emailed by a source that hooks them up with that sweet access for an interview to ‘clear things up”, and then they do a super softball interview without so much as any pushback, and then after that quietly deletes an older article bringing attention to someone complaining about the person they just interviewed in a softball manner, I get pretty darn upset and doubt the credibility of your website, or at least you as a writer for said website.

Yes, I am subposting about Damien Mcferran at Time Extension. Yes, I don’t like naming and shaming fellow journalist peers. But come the fuck on, you cannot keep giving softball interviews and ignoring comments asking you to dig into the company further or do anything remotely critical of them, while also refusing to stop covering everything and anything about Palmer Luckey’s Chromatic because it’s “relevant gaming news”, despite the many comments in each article begging you to stop platforming an arms dealer. (Edit: while I was wrapping this up, the Chromatic did a partnership with Luckey’s other, much worse company, which led to Time Extension finally cutting all ties with ModRetro. Legitimately, thank you for finally doing that, even if the rest of this section is me railing on you)

It doesn’t help that some people at these outlets/youtube channels have outright appeared in certain LRG related podcasts, videos, or even carbon engine products as friends of the company, and thus absolutely will never talk bad about them, and if they did they’ll go to immediately slobbering over them if they get candy waved in front of their face. “Oh you didn’t like our QC/called out our messup? well how about a free prototype copy of Doom for the SNES FX3 or an interview with our not-a-business-idiot CEO! Better not ask brutally honest questions and push hard, or you might lose free stuff! It’s just a misunderstanding we messed up on QC this time, just don’t pay attention to the next dozen times we do so as long as the company structure remains the same!”

It really becomes jarring especially when certain youtube channels, especially those known to critique emulation collections for even minor stuff like audio lag or pixel scaling, suddenly go numb and shut up when say, a Carbon Engine release like the Gex Trilogy happens with some pretty glaring bugs, and they can’t even be bothered to critique that in any way. What’s the matter? Is the fear of losing access to a North Carolinian company that intimidating to avoid pushing back or giving criticism like most other reviewers actually go out to do? Review websites don’t shy away from being critical of these Carbon games when need be, even if someone at said website is friends with a LRG employee, (those specific employees just don’t do the review) so why do so many youtubers/influencers cave like this?

Or heaven forbid, you be honest to your audience or just don’t even touch the game at all, not even in passing? It’s honestly pathetic, and Time Extension went through all of these steps regarding the next QC screwup (And first big thing to force a rewrite to this piece) in the form of some weirdly dangerous NES carts.

See, I have praised Retro-Bit for being LRG’s consistent supplier for retro carts and generally doing a good job with them. In fact, I like them so much I can usually tell my peers who want to preorder a LRG thing that they can add the retro NES/SNES/GB/Genesis/N64 carts as a safe thing to buy, since Retro-Bit’s QC is insanely good and leads to pretty great reprints of retro games, so LRG using them as a partner is a delightful idea. Unfortunately for some godforsaken reason, they did not use Retro-bit as a partner for a few NES titles, including Rugrats: Adventures in Gameland, and indie game PIOPOW. Yes, they made an NES Rugrats game, and no, I do not know why. Knowing our luck we’ll likely get a Code Lyoko game on Turbografx CD.

Anyhow, unlike Retro-Bit, which does stuff at proper voltage and to usually good results, (S.C.A.T having the RetroUSB AVS aside, it was fine on OG NES systems) whatever provider LRG used for these two NES titles just really didn’t care about the QC on their end. And with LRG certainly not willing to do their own heavy QC for something like that, (they will for some things; Shantae Advance had an excessive amount due to the various GBA systems that could run the game and that being something they’d be in deep shit for messing up), Rugrats in particular launched with multiple weird quirks.

The NES cart has the Co-Op mode from the console ports, but it’s completely broken. You can’t actually finish the game in co-op, and one of my friends who went out of their way to buy it to play with their wife only to run into that gamebreaking bug was rightfully irritated. LRG didn’t really seem to budge on that aspect when it was brought up at the time, though.

No, it was only after it was discovered how the voltage for Piopow and Rugrats was all fucked up and could fry your NES or the cart itself that LRG did anything resembling any kind of action. Yet again when they do remedy a situation like this, they did stuff I can give kudos for such as replacing all in-manufacturing editions with the new cart, (so those who didn’t receive it won’t get the bad version) and offering full refunds to those who don’t want the games to be re-manufactured properly. Good they resolved it in a decent way, but again, in what feels like a yearly tradition, none of this would have ever happened if they did proper quality control and played the game from start to finish multiple times, in solo and co-op play.

It is also near the start of 2026, and those replacements for Rugrats still do not exist as of now, so for all we know they might quietly end up in the void. The fact we’re in 2025, and LRG has a different COO and these sort of corner cutting measures are still happening should be pretty apparent to you that these fuckups are not the fault of just one person, but rather the structure of LRG as a whole.

As recently as my eight major edit of this damn article, the Tomb Raider I-III ultra CE came in with pretty hideous “Retro Lara” figurines, showing the same sort of lazy QC as I complained about all the way back in fucking 2021. Then the Castlevania Dominus Collection’s Ultra CE had songs on the first disc of soundtrack CD from the Advance Collection, although this swiftly got an email sent out promising correction discs. Lastly, right before publication, the Sonic X Shadow Generations statue came in for people, and Sonic fans are not happy with how shoddy it looks compared to even Jakks Pacific toys or the JP Collector edition.

All three of those very recent ultra CE fuckups, also debunked what Dubious Source was saying to me about them totally improving their quality control since Doug was booted, as if anything it proved even more to me how that reassurance a big fat lie. I do not like people who gaslight me like that, or are just overly ignorant in that way. Mistakes happen, yes. Constantly making mistakes over and over again after being made aware of them is just silly, especially when one of said mistakes didn’t catch your attention, and only the mistake that could have killed people’s expensive retro system made you act, again only after getting a callout on it.

Weeks after Time Extension did surprisingly good reporting on this NES incident, Damien gave that softball interview to Josh Fairhurst I complained about. This was sparked by, and I quote, “a mutual contact managed to connect us with Fairhurst, who was keen to speak with us and address some of the points raised above.“, AKA someone getting mad/annoyed about the company getting pushback on another fuckup they did, so someone close to Josh probably reached out to the site to give them a free interview to turn down the heat and change the subject. Or maybe there was legitimate benefit of the doubt here, but I have my reasons to not feel that way.

The interview was filled with pretty much the usual PR fluff LRG gives in response to stuff, insisting they learned from their mistakes for real this time, they try their best, COVID did a lot on them, CEs take longer due to MOQ, etc etc etc. Yes, there’s truth to a lot of that (COVID derailed a ton of companies, MOQ is vital to manufacturing and MOD products like CEs naturally take a year+ by nature, so unless they got all the CE stuff before the orders went live, they can’t exactly time travel a finished CE from the future), but there was next to no pushback at all to any of these answers. Barely anything about why certain bad QC stuff happened was brought up including the recent NES stuff, dismissing the accusation Doug made about corner cutting without providing any concrete proof to that not being the case, (despite the many, many, many, many cases of corner cutting, just mostly on niche products) and going on yet again about people getting mad at LRG in the past and insisting they learn from their mistakes.

Still, this softball text interview was just that, softball. I wouldn’t even be writing about it if it wasn’t for the fact that a few months later, the article Time Extension wrote earlier about Doug’s medium post I linked earlier is completely gone, wiped off the face of the website in a very quiet manner. That’s why earlier in the article, you had me linking to a web archive of it, since they just quietly deleted it, with no explanation or warning! There were tiny shards of truth to it even if it had some twisting of facts, and it was an old article most readers probably weren’t thinking about anymore, anyway! Why would you even delete it that far later? It’s not like the whole thing was a 100% lie, there was actual nuggets of truth in it! (Albeit clearly done out of a “I got thrown out so I’m taking you with me” mindset) Deleting it without any explanation is just silly, in my honest opinion, and I can’t help but wonder if they were explicitly asked to do so.

Then afterward, after a smaller incident with Shantae GBA carts having weirdly dirty chips inside (the board itself is fine and quality, being Retro-Bit boards, but the chips are recycled and look like shit due to the old nature of GBA carts, and there should still have been QC done to clean them all up nicely. However, the game itself is still in better shape than those Rugrats NES carts and it would have been a non-story if they just fucking cleaned the things.) said tabloid mostly backs away from critiquing the company, including by refusing to look at a certain video I highlighted months ago in any way, shape or form despite multiple comments from their readers indicating they had sent it in as a news tip and wanted it investigated to know more/learn the facts or if anything could be backed up in it, and were just ignored on it.

Funny, as I had sent in news tips to that same outlet about other companies that did way worse shit than LRG ever has/will with even more credible receipts years ago, only for them to ghost those kinds of stories until some devs got scammed by said company and it became too big to ignore. Oops. Outside of a small reply in a comment section indicating Damien would ask Josh about the video, nothing further came of this site expressing interest in any sort of critical pushback toward the company, and recently Damien did another puff interview promoting their Little Samson reissue. (which credit where credit is due, I know of too many attempts to get that game reissued, all of which failed until now, so LRG really did pull out all the stops to get that game out again. Thank Japanese Copyright law, and that goes to show when they’re stubborn on getting something done, they can do it; hence why if they got truly stubborn on good QC, they have the resources to do so.)

Oh yeah, I guess I should talk about that and their overall shift in strategy before we wrap it up here.

“That” Video, and Sucking Dry Physical Media

Months ago I brought attention to a video that highlighted some pretty big allegations towards LRG, some matching what Doug had said in his article, and some, as I noted in my article recommending it, matching a few things I had personally heard over the past few years regarding Josh and how some things at LRG went down with their work culture. I had no involvement in the making of the video and all I pretty much said was that if any of the darker stuff in the video is remotely true and proven to be such, independent investigations need to be done, and I presume Embracer will act to do such. That was essentially the most I had to do with it, and an independent investigation into the allegations like that video is far out of my personal scope and one I will not do. Do not bother me to do one. Ask someone skilled in that. I am not your PI.

Still, when the video came out I was still pretty disturbed by how several allegations matched what I had heard or seen previously discussed. Josh being the top brass in charge of absolutely everything. Ideas he had going above all the others. Him not liking critics that negatively talked about his work (this allegedly goes back to the SMRPG days on Mobile, as I’m personally aware), and buying obsessively for his own personal collection. Employees being outright blacklisted if they left/were fired from the company, (I know of a small few this happened to, but this wasn’t a Josh exclusive thing AFAIK, Doug had done this as well) and his rabid dislike of competitors like IAm8Bit and Signature Edition.

While I can’t verify all of it as most is above my paygrade to look into deeper myself, (and would make this massive article even more nightmarish to finish) I do see the stubbornness of Josh and his outright narcissism being pretty believable. Doug cited it, I cited it after witnessing Josh doing that to me 4 years ago, and others I have spoken to in the industry over the past four years have cited it, including one who outright stated the whole GDC Covid allegation mentioned in the video did happen. Some of the people I talked with about this have been in the industry since the 1990s, and I’m more likely to believe them more than anyone else on their judgements of the company and how it’s ran, with the little bit I could personally back up from my own sourcing.

On one hand, stubborn behavior can lead to unintentional good moves in hindsight, like how LRG has always been strictly against the worst of recent trends. They refused to partake in NFTs, they refused to partake in the graded game nonsense (outside of a singular charity auction they did), refused to partake in Cryptocurrency, and refused to partake in the ludicrous GenAI bubble on the verge of shooting directly at the US Economy. I firmly believe if Josh wasn’t in charge, some of that stuff would have absolutely been attempted by Embracer, especially with how so much of this industry has meddled in that due to investor pressure. That’s kinda why smaller companies doing their own thing is what I personally prefer instead of a megacorp or country trying to forcefully make a terrible fad into a major viral trend.

Nevertheless, even with only the stuff I know personally that has happened regarding Josh and Doug, I personally feel both are really not good people, and so the video’s allegations do not surprise me. That LRG started up a small company, had it grow way above their expectations, and rather than passing the torch or changing things up to account for the size difference, they just kept running it the same way, over and over again, controversies and bad QC be damned, for nearly an entire decade with each year getting worse and worse to an extent.

Doug may have gotten thrown aside and only just now realized how messed up everything else was, and maybe he might actually atone for his prior actions and shit he enabled, but with how I’ve dealt with him and talked with others who have also done so, I honestly doubt it and I feel it’d be better for the guy to just quietly do his own thing in life, since I really don’t think Rock-It is gonna be the next LRG or even a remotely viable competitor, just because the Limprint Boom is long over.

Bear in mind, some of their games had preorders open up a year ago. That being said, it does seem like they are making progress via status updates, but even then it seems Rock-It is more likely to be just yet another third party publisher than a true Limprint competitor. I’ve already been made aware of a couple of publishers that dropped plans to release games through them, although I wasn’t able to find the exact reasons as to why. Those reasons, and the reasons as to why their first game, was mysteriously canceled are up for those involved parties to disclose, and not my business.

All I know is trying to join the limprint bubble at this point in its life is a remarkably stupid decision, and diversifying via Amazon and not making their products store exclusive and leaning more towards being a smaller third party is probably a good move in hindsight, but if any CE items come in with QC errors, well, I won’t be surprised. If they do pull off CE item QC checks though, that just further proves how much LRG is botching things by not doing what smaller publishing outfits can do and have done for years now. If companies the same size or smaller than LRG can do consistently good quality control checks, why can’t they, after ten years?

Speaking of “just another publisher”, that’s the vibe I now get from Limited Run of all things, which has made this wild journey ten years in the making end up at quite the awkward spot to end on. Years ago, they’d be publishing some of the coolest indie hidden gems on Switch and PS4 and making neat physical editions of stuff you might not have heard of, but really enjoyed playing once you gave them a go. Now they seem to just take whatever Square, SEGA, Konami and even Capcom throw at them that they really don’t want to do themselves in the US, and basically act as their glorified online retailer so they can pull out of other physical stores and not make as many copies.

Gradius Origins via LRG? Sure! Even on Xbox. (Their whole Xbox push I basically blanked on for this article, but TLDR: they did Xbox games, still kinda do xbox games, and their xbox games are the only games from them actually rare nowadays since shocker, people who own Xbox consoles typically don’t care much for physical games unless they’re used and cheap. I’m surprised they took the financial risk at all and I’d see that platform being the next one to get discontinued, even before PS4.)

Yakuza 0-6 reprints on PS4, despite them all being dirt cheap on the aftermaket, and with the launch day builds on all the PS4 (but not Xbox) versions people preordered and waited months for despite CS insisting they’d be all on disc? Why not, even though VGP has done reprints of various games for ages, much more consistently, and won’t lie to you about it having builds they don’t have. (nor will they ignore refund requests, as i’ve heard from some people who got those PS4 versions and tried seeking one due to being outright lied to)

Valkryia Chronicles on Switch? Um, OK, years later, the game is cheaper on the eShop, but I guess if you don’t like that neat PS4 steelbook.

Capcom Arcade Stadium?!? Uh, I mean, you could just wait for a sale and buy all those games at once for much, much cheaper. I guess a physical of Progear might be neat, I suppose, kinda.

Puyo Puyo Champions– oh you gotta be shitting me

Yep, that’s basically what modern LRG has morphed into. They do numbered releases still (for the maniacs who somehow trust they’ll follow their word and give a complete set reward, which I remind you, they lied about for Vita, and have never delivered on despite promising to many times by now. If they do in the next few months, it was only because of customer pressure, and do publish some indies… But most of the ones that aren’t mainstream or have a cult following are just PS5 exclusive due to that having the safe 1000 copy MOQ. Some of them are still outright shitposts or horrible games, to the point i’d not be shocked if something like that crappy Baby Boomer sequel (yes, it exists, yes, it’s horrifying) gets pooped onto a disc at some point, and a lot of their bigger stuff are games said big companies could easily do on their own at all retail chains, but just choose not to anymore probably because they see direct-to-online retail as their off ramp.

Yeah, SEGA of all companies really needs the power of a small North Carolina business backed by a megacorp in order to get Sonic Racing Crossroads on a PS4 disc bundled exclusively with a collector edition! Heaven forbid they just throw them at Target for a mom and kid to casually buy, that would be stupid! Microsoft really needs help with that classic Doom duology, but not the newest Dark Ages game, that’s A-OK! BDS? What’s that? We have plastic to print here! They also need help with Wolfenstein and Hexen too so let’s get to it! Indies and hidden gems that can’t actually get publishers normally? Nah, they’re puny now, go away, you can get your PS5 versions published though, if you’re lucky.

Thus, it’s with this shift, to being a glorified publisher for third parties to offload stuff onto, that makes LRG end on a bit of a bummer note for me. Sure, they’re an active company and even now, still way more reliable than the other limprints who outright scammed people, (tldr for orders from LRG; you’ll get your shit eventually, even if it might get all fucked up in the process if it’s anything above a standard edition) but in a weird way, what started as a group meant to “save physical gaming” is arguably accelerating the demise of it. Why should Sega bother going to big box retail if they can make even on physical copies via LRG? maybe a future Yakuza’s physical edition will be LRG exclusive for all we know, and then the door to darkness will have truly opened. (I also find it funny the one digital only Yakuza game, Like a Dragon Gaiden has not gotten a LRG release as of time of this writing, and that Yakuza 3 Dark Ties is getting a retail Xbox release while Yakuza 3 Remastered had to get LRG’s help.)

Hell, if you want to avoid the headache of LRG support, a reddit that seems to be moderated only by a customer service account, and a discord I couldn’t seem to tell if it was even working anymore during the making of this article (Apparently, it was taken down “for maintenance” as of October, and might be back up soon… or perhaps not), you might just be better off picking up your wanted titles via VGP… Or even Ebay. Unless you’re an Xbox fan or like their CEs, most of their games don’t tend to get inflated prices anymore, which I suppose is a nice benefit to having high MOQs with some stuff having low buyers. Either way, whether this company ends up being in a history book as a catalyst to some companies ditching physical games in North America/in general and making them exclusive to LRG, remains to be seen.

Not even the Carbon Engine, their digital plan to preserve games (via emulations that only recently became rather good/OK) seems to be doing hot lately. Most of their reissues have weird bugs or quirks that even cheaper, more amateur reissues of games from the same platforms do not have, and they hardly, if ever get fixed even with people filing bug reports via the steam forums or customer service. Sometimes they’ll get fixed out of nowhere in a patch that adds Japanese language like with Tomba, only for a new bug to crop up and be ignored. Or you could be Boy and His Blob and have missing NES sound channels for sampled crowd audio. No, I will not stop pointing at how stupid that was for a commercial release especially when one of the leads of the Carbon Engine emulators boasted about his technical knowledge on his youtube channel for years before joining the Carbon Team. This is beyond embarrassing.

sorry you had to get farted on by the blob king dude

As of the wrapping of this article, both of the main leads on Carbon Engine games (Modern Vintage Gamer, yes, the Youtuber, and Joe, the cool dev behind Super Gunworld) have left LRG for Digital Eclipse, and two of their more recent reissues have been done by different companies; Bitwave for Earthion, and Implicit Conversions for Fear Effect. Both of them have gotten better reception for emulation quality than the recent Carbon Engine, in-house Tomba 2 port, so they might just be moving to shift emulation duties to outside parties than trying to do it all in house. Maybe that’s for the best. Even one of their next collections, Snow Bros Classic Collection, is being done by a company named Headless Chicken.

ACT III: WHY COLLECT? ARE WE OVERCONSUMING?

Is this even preservation?

Let’s end off this long, long piece about the rot of LRG spreading beyond the original company in their lack for QC/good conduct, with how this whole thing all started. Supposedly, as a mission to preserve video games. The mindset I fell into for a while, and what LRG initially sold their company and initial releases on, and why I bought hundreds of games from them before I broke off shortly before that first article I put out got made is that all digital things will come to an end and upon that happening, you won’t be able to play games anymore you or a kid might have grown up with. People with Wii/DSi/3DS/Wii U systems that don’t have an existing account already know this, and there’s no way to buy those games with a system picked up on the aftermarket. (Yes, I’m still bitter about all those PC Engine games lost to the Wii.)

For me, complete lost of access already happened, and if you were a huge early 2010s mobile gamer, it absolutely did to you too. As an iPod Touch fanatic, I loved the early days of mobile gaming. Really, really loved it. You might not think that now with how I’ve kinda dunked on it off and on here at SFG, and tend to only really enjoy more casual oriented games or titles with cool crossplay capabilities, but I bought so many cheap iOS games back when the App Store was hot. Some hyper obscure due to just wanting whatever puzzle game I could find, and some being pretty well known ones like Cut the Rope. EA made an excellent version of Tetris, only to later update it into a microtransaction ridden mess before the mobile Tetris rights were vomited towards another company.

One set of games I really was into before the advent of Game Center was Openfeint. This was basically a proto-achievement hunting set of games that were meant for those new to the achievement bug or those who couldn’t dare play a video game without popups telling you that you found a cool little challenge or cleared it, before Apple went in and made it a bigger standard with Game Center. I remember buying and picking up so many random games specifically because of Openfeint, and finding some absolute classics like Super Stickman Golf. (which thankfully still exists, as far as I’m aware)

Then Openfeint shut down. Some games were updated to break free of Openfeint. A lot of them did not. Some of them became unusable and failed to function anymore or had limited features, and thus, a good chunk of mobile gaming history went along with that. Then you had the many, many, many delistings of mobile games over the years, or iOS updates that broke them so they no longer functioned. That happened to some games I owned, which soured me on spending more than $5 on a mobile game from that point onward. Yeah, that Rayforce port looks real fun, but I’m worried the minute I buy it the plug will get pulled on it. Don’t even get me started on the sheer amount of online only games that people pour money into via MTX only for said game to shut down, and you to be told to kick rocks for the investment.

Subscription services are even worse, with Apple Arcade and Netflix games delisting titles just because they can, with either no way to play the game at all or being forced into a microtransaction-ridden version. One of my friends had their kid get devastated by the fact a Netflix Butterfly collecting game was just being quietly delisted in October, and the F2P version is just too greedy for it to be safe for their kid to play. There’s no way to buy the version their kid likes without the ads/MTX, nor is there a way to get Netflix to keep it by paying them more money. It just went poof. Gone, into the ether.

Anyhow, all that is to give a rambling example of how I’ve had games lost due to server shenanigans or platform changes. Yes, it really sucks, especially when the only evidence you have of you playing a game is secondhand footage of you playing on an old iPod touch from nearly two decades ago, and your own personal memories. I still have fond memories of this bizarrely janky iOS port of Mega Man 2 with a fake arcade border and everything, and how that was technically my first exposure to the NES Mega Man 2. Now neither that nor Capcom’s modern versions seem to be available.

For consoles on the other hand, things are a bit more stable, but even then we have an awful lot of newer games with an online focus or stupidly locking the single player mode behind an online connection. (Hello, Hitman) With the aforementioned Nintendo shutdowns (even with redownloads currently active), there’s a bunch of cool obscurities lost to the system or needing to be ported to other consoles. Yes, that also sucks. I really want Hazumi to be on anything but the 3DS, since it was a cool game. If LRG somehow got that on physical cart before the deadline, I’d even have bought that despite my misgivings with them.

Unfortunately, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from the past 11 years of running SFG and my own gaming habits as a whole, it’s that as much as some days I wish to return to the happier times of my GBA kid days, where I just sat in my apartment basement playing Pokemon Emerald non-stop and being in awe with the world on my wide GBA I could barely see shit on, I can’t. None of us can. Is it still super neat when Futuridium gets a physical release for PS4/Vita so that game won’t be tied to publisher delistings that may or may not happen? Sure! Does it mean if I pick up my PS4 disc in a decade, I’ll feel just like I did when playing it on the New 3DS and found it to be pretty neat? Not really, even if I still love the game! It’ll be a new, different memory, shaped by the events going on in that age, not the age of when I first played it.

The one factor I keep noticing from people into this limprint collecting hobby, and the mindsets of some people behind the whole “everything must be on a singular cartridge/disc”, is that rather than wanting it all in one place because it’s handy, cool looking, or saves on storage space/cost of buying DLC, is that no, this thing must be enshrined in plastic so that it is preserved. That way when the totally real scenario of the entire internet ceasing to exist happens and every console with internet support exploding all at once and never ever being able to ever go online ever again in the history of mankind because there’s no way a homebrew solution wouldn’t be made at some point, this disc will live and be able to… uh… um… checks notes play the video game offline.

Don’t mind the fact that update CDNs have been active on PSP since 2004, or that even the 3DS still lets you download bug fixes for retail games. Or that more often than not, the base build on even PS5 disc games are still fine and play decently enough even if they don’t have every bug fix or DLC included, it’s only preservation if it includes everything. Now obviously, you might be a casual collector and scoff at this and go “well I don’t mind updates, I just like when the base game is all on disc and I don’t have to download patches that take forever!” which, good for you, I feel that’s most normal people nowadays, but the limprint audience in particular, across all companies from LRG, to Super Rare, to the sad folk still thinking First Press Games is an active company, seem really fixated on the idea that if it isn’t all in one spot, it doesn’t count. Not a real game, not a real release.

I’m not joking when I say I’ve seen some in the collector community go absolutely feral when a LRG/limprint game gets a minor bug fix patch and their sudden “complete on cart” experience is shattered. It’s one thing to be annoyed when you buy a complete DLC edition only for the game to get even more DLC, but it’s another to think that not having minor patches is the end of the world. It’s even more annoying when multiple companies openly advertise based on the fact everything is complete, only for that promise to be either impractical to keep forever, or an outright lie as in the case of Tomba earlier. Either you commit to the bit, or you don’t, whereas most retail games you just pick up, buy the video game, and download whatever patches are needed. Targeting the kind of collectors hyper particular about this stuff and botching it, will just make those hyper particular collectors mad at you while if that was done for say, a retail game, ordinary gamers wouldn’t bat an eye.

And I think outside of the reasonable explanations of saving storage space or accessibility for those without the means to download huge patches of updates, (a relative of mine does not have internet at all, and finding PS3 games that worked without patches/online modes for them was a nightmare when buying late-gen games, so resources like Does it Play? are legitimately useful for those situations) there’s more or less a desire I see from a lot of people regarding collecting these newer physical releases, limprint or retail, to treat the newer gen titles like the retro ones from their youth. Duh, you just open the game, pop it in and it works! If it includes a manual with a kajillion pages, even better! (Despite some NES/SMS games only having like, 12 pages tops sometimes)

The fact of the matter is that being 100% complete on day one isn’t how many games are developed nowadays. Even if a limprint nabs a game that’s currently complete, who’s to say it won’t need a new patch later on, or it gets DLC? Is the physical version then worthless, or do you just go on and download the friggin patch and get a grip? If you act like you must be fully off the grid to enjoy gaming 10 years from now (when more likely than not, you’ll have other things to worry in life about before playing a 2025 physical copy of some random video game, such as taxes, the sun, the economy, human rights, local politics, or healthcare), then I’m sorry to say, that isn’t how modern gaming works.

It’s still neat when companies can manage to put everything on the disc from the getgo, and having a digital game get a bit more longevity via a physical version is cool, but wanting all digital games, or as many as possible to be slapped onto a disc for the sake of “preservation for decades to come” is ridiculous when most titles are also available on other platforms such as Steam or GOG, in fully digital formats. Retro games being pressed on carts is another factor, but even those aren’t gonna be perfect and it can just be repressed on another batch if there’s any critical bugs found (hence what they’re doing with Rugrats)

Instead what you get is lots of crap/random games pressed onto a disc by all these publishers for the heck of it to target a set of creators that act like a Carrington Event 2.0 will wipe out all of gaming. Lots and lots of crap. And that doesn’t even begin to take into account the online focus or modes some of these titles have, and the whole mess that causes that I argue is more of an actual issue for preservation.

Oh shit I stepped on another Bluray- OH GOD WHERE DID YOU COME FROM

In the past, you might be able to reasonably collect every game for a console if you were A: rich, B: had lots of space and C: were dedicated to a system you loved. Most people find it easier to just collect games from their favorite company or series, and for me that’s Mystery Dungeon and Chunsoft titles, with the PC Engine being the closest I’ll get to putting everything related to it on my shelf because I find a game for my favorite console, even if it’s another Mahjong or Baseball game. As the years went on, more games got made for the more popular consoles, meaning those were harder to collect a full set for, with some like the Wii being an exercise in insanity due to the mountains of shovelware needed to collect everything. Gone were the days you might stumble upon a baseball game that was so terrible it ended up being hillarious, but rather yet another dull rushjob movie tie-in that you stumble across over and over and over again.

Anyhow, what I personally consider to be the last consoles you could reasonably collect every physical game in a singular region for were the Wii U and 3DS. Wii U because well, it was a dead platform by the second year, and 3DS because the support was decent but not overwhelmingly so, with more of the smaller titles being eShop exclusives. I say the Limited Print scene as a whole is hugely responsible for making the PS4, Switch, and Vita the most nigh-impossible full sets I could possibly think of. Yes, even more than the PS2.

Vita you might have some grace if you focus on a full EU set, but if you’re focused on Asian or US releases, you’re gonna have a tough time because the bulk of them were shoved out via these limited prints. LRG makes a rather huge percentage of that system’s physical library, which is a cool thing on one hand when they were new, you were collecting them and had a big Vita Memory Card, and not-so cool nowadays when you realize the Vita memory cards are dying incredibly fast to the point you might need to mod your vita to use an SD card for saving game data, which blocks the cartridge slot. Oops.

Yes, it wasn’t LRG’s fault that Sony made real shitty memory cards. But due to the limited amount of copies manufactured for those games, finding some of them can be really tough. And for the ones that didn’t quite make it or were tied behind silly giveaways? Well if you consider Bird King a true part of the Vita lineup, then nobody except whatever LRG employees have them (or if that giveaway to complete set buyers will actually go off without a hitch) will ever be able to complete that collection, and I seriously doubt LRG will ever care enough to live up to their end of the customer bargain with that game. Nicalis outright has unreleased Vita games that do exist and were manufactured, but never released. Do they count? Or are they excluded because of their unicorn status? Who knows! There’s no Judge that decides what is truly a complete collection besides you, the one collecting your collection.

So now you just have a mountain of plastic cartridges you either A: can’t really play anymore, or B: are just more practical to play digitally. Which due to how the Vita store is setup these days, is easier said than done. Congrats, you were like me in realizing their PS Vita collection was just a plastic dump and only kept their favorites.

What about PS4/PS5 and Switch, though? Oh god. I don’t think anyone is even bothering to fullset PS4 games as I noted earlier, since LRG has made so darn many of them, and so has literally every other limprint I can think of. Some were barely even released into the wild like Limited Rare’s Poop Slinger, while others were artificially held back or limited for the sake of lame roleplaying purposes, such as Hard Copy Games/Limited Rare 2’s Tamashii. Do you really want a lot of your wall to be taken up by EXE Create Kemco RPGs? Do you?!? Since there’s no real reason to stop making PS4 games, I could see this being the absolute behemoth of physical media collecting for anyone insane enough to go ahead with it. Same goes for Switch, although pricier cartridges make it tougher to deal with. Still, a higher MOQ means you at least won’t have any North American games below 5000 copies.

So what’s the problem for these systems? More games means you don’t have to collect them all, but that just means you have more options to pick up, right? There’s no reason to worry if digital stores do go down or if something is delisted, since you have plenty to play! Except well, uh, for both Switch and PS4, I think the issue now is curation, or lack of it. What made the early days of limprint collecting for me exciting was that each release felt like an event, a big deal, a huge get. Finally, a smaller indie game was getting more attention and was able to be played in a while I could share easily with friends or recommend people have fun with. They didn’t just press everything that released on PS4, they still curated it so that if you picked up a game you’d never heard of before, you’d probably still have a good time.

That’s how I enjoyed N++ or Lili, after all. Switch was even more curated due to the bigger financial risk involved with the cartridges, which made them feel like you were getting miniature little collectibles that had a brand new experience inside, and rolling the dice on a new LRG Switch game meant you’d probably have some fun with it. In a weird sense, the current thin roster of non Game Key Card Switch 2 games is a weirdly exciting return to the early, highly curated days of the Switch 1.

I’d say after 2020, everything went outta control. More companies got into the limprint bubble, more third party publishers popped up, and PS4 in particular had a sheer amount of companies just putting whatever they could onto a disc because of the low MOQ. I’m positive if I had infinite money and found a random PS4 digital game that nobody was paying attention to and with a willing developer, even I could print a PS4 physical release of it. PS5 didn’t really change the MOQ as far as I’m aware, which just made that subject to the same sort of flood of everything goes for physical media, even when it doesn’t make any god damn sense. Thus, people like myself ended up buying these games less for the excitement of playing them or discovering a new gem, but because they were either another box on the checklist or we got captivated by a cool looking CE tugging at nostalgia strings, until we either snapped out of the full set mindset, stuck to only favorites, or just backed out altogether.

For one example I’ll give you for a game that should not have gotten a PS4 physical release, yet did anyway, one of the worst PS4 games I ever reviewed was a game called Strikers Edge. It was a barebones multiplayer game kinda like Windjammers, with the main focus being online multiplayer. The problem was, the online multiplayer was immediately dead, it had barely any content otherwise, and not even a future update could save it. The game still got a PS4 pressing anyway, and now with the servers shut you barely have a worthwhile game. Is this preservation? Sure, you technically have the very thin single player on disc to play for however long your blu-ray lasts, but why ever bother? At least the also shuttered Killer Queen Black came with some cool decals in the box and had a more robust local multiplayer experience, but even that was another instance of a game that maybe could have been less dependent on physical.

Now we come to the modern state of physical gaming. The year is almost 2026. We have so many physical PS4/5/Switch games, but there’s too god damn many of them, with some of them making next to no sense. Lots of options are fine, excessive overprinting and lots of plastic being around that nobody will ever have the time to fully play really isn’t. The former curation these limprints all did that helped us discover fun new gems no longer exists, and now you have either online only or online-dependent games pressed on discs just like the big AAA publishers that could easily become e-waste faster than any server shutdown, “physical” version or not. Congrats, you discovered overconsumption, and realize the limited print bubble created a fad preying off of people wanting to just relive the feeling of their youth.

But will your kids be playing any of these? Your friends? Your family? What is your day after plan for all this stuff when all is said or done, especially when that’s more likely to be a factor for collectors than some server shutdown making every digital game on earth unplayable. Are you buying to collect and enjoy the game, or are you buying to recreate the high of getting a shiny new thing as a kid and opening it up to get a nostalgia high?

Conclusion, Once and for all

No, Limited Run and other companies like it didn’t help you travel back in time to the 1980s with each game getting a fancy booklet and being pop and play, no, you don’t get to live in the world where you can invite people weekly for pizza parties playing multiplayer games on Nintendo 64, no, you just ended up making games that were digital for pretty good reasons (scope, scale, budget) pressed into physical discs for next to no good reason besides a hope, a premonition, that a console wide server shutdown would devastate gaming and make everything not online-focused gone forever, rather than the more likely reality of Roblox steamrolling every non-mobile game in a decade from now due to the walled garden keeping Gen Alpha locked into that game forever and ever, and Gen Alpha thus not likely to give a shit about whether or not Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties is on a PS4 disc.

You want every game under the sun for a system stuck on plastic because that’s how it was when you were a kid. As a Gen Zer who loves going back and collecting older physical games and discovering new obscurities because they’re all new to me, I get the urge to want to have everything or have your kids discover the same stuff you did growing up. To just go back in time, and just get that dopamine hit from collecting to mitigate other stressors in life. I hate to say it, but that is not the world we live in. I still will go out to nab physical copies of newer games I really, really, really like, but I have been shifting more and more digital since 2021 anyhow. If I want to play a video game, I want to play the darn video game.

Will some of my favorite digital games not end up on physical media? Probably, and that sucks if a server shutdown of the Switch store does happen and a game I liked never got a PC release. Whip Whip! was one of my favorite Switch indies, but with the developer going completely bankrupt and the windows version relying on Windows 10 fonts that might not exist/be usable later down the line (it does not work on Steam Deck for that reason) that game is gone to the ether for most people.

Ultimately, I see the state of physical gaming like a rainstorm. Yes, there’s lots of rain and people enjoy it while others get annoyed. But wanting and expecting everything on earth to get a physical release is just not practical. It never was, even if all of these limprint companies became highly successful. It’s like trying to catch rain in a bucket; you may get a lot of raindrops, but it’s become impossible to catch every raindrop. Now some companies see limprints like LRG as their means of reducing or exiting their own bigger retail presence altogether, which just shrinks the raincloud. This giant behemoth grew and grew until it just threw up tons of blue video game cases all over the place. I don’t like the idea of some digital only games being lost to time.

But instead of companies like Limited Run being able to smartly cultivate a market to preserve the best of the best, and maintain consistent quality control, they fell to their own ego. Printing so many SKUs constantly, despite repeated promises to “slow down”. Other companies popped up and died, or are on the verge of dying even if they hide their terminal symptoms. Some like Rock-It will likely just go under the radar and only be known if they get a huge thing everyone wants. Now we have a new console with more expensive storage media, which either will seriously financially damage companies trying to go the full physical route to satisfy a shrinking group of buyers, (thus ironically leading to more curation again, although recent developments of smaller cart sizes might change that soon) or just lead to this being completely unsustainable and the burst bubble totally evaporates and physical gaming pretty much peters out outside of these niche direct to order websites.

I know I have gone on long, ludicrously long, longer than I ever wanted to, and ever will again. TLDR for this section is: you can’t repeat your childhood. Even if LRG or whatnot pushes their model as a means of going back to the pop in and play nature of the 80s and reissue as many retro games as they can with Cartoon characters in them. Ironically, their retro cart reissues might just be the one set of products that might actually replicate that feeling the best, and are very well made to boot. But even getting a nice reprint of a game like Dragon View as top quality as Retro-Bit makes them will never replace the feeling that going to rent the game from Blockbuster back in the 90s to discover a hidden gem would have, because the 90s were different.

A lot of people have wrote to me and commented to me over the years that they think the sole reason I am grumpy post Shiren and still gripe about LRG whenever they do yet another fuckup is because I am “obsessed” with them and that I want these companies to all get thanos snapped and for no physical games to come out ever again, or at least for the limprint companies to die completely. That couldn’t be further from the truth, and I’d truly like these companies a lot more if they were more curated, better quality publishers that released stuff Discotek Media style with all the care and bells and whistles that company does for Anime Blu-Rays. Well made products that feel like special events and are well worth the upcharge from a digital version via a streaming service or whatnot.

I hoped the Carbon Engine would be that for some hyper obscure retro games no bigshot company would dare touch, but that fizzled out and seems likely to go away entirely. I wanted these companies to slow down and get better. I wanted the people buying from them to be happy and have little issues with QC, and for LRG to not be run by absolute dweebs who would rather huff their own farts as business idiots than get down and dirty and seriously fix their quality control or even admit they fucked up at all.

I am not writing this article as a means to go “oh you like overconsuming plastic video games? you are a bad person“. I actually think it is really stupid when people make vids about how they broke away from collecting and think the big fix is for everyone to just stop collecting entirely, instead of smartly buying the stuff they truly want to enjoy and have fun with rather than using it as a failed method of time travel. I still collect retro games frequently. I still buy the occasional physical Switch game. I even still import obscurities for Switch like Hokkaido Serial Murder Case. I just no longer have a pile of plastic CEs stacked in the corner of my bedroom like I used to because I wanted that dopamine hit of a retro looking box that reminded me of the good parts of my youth. I’m just more content with enjoying video games as a passing moment and moving on, because nothing is forever.

Rather, I wrote this entire spiel, this huge article, had it checked by friends of mine, to essentially say this: The Limited Print market was set up to “save” physical gaming. But rather, it ended up being a catalyst to the slow demise of modern games getting physical releases, since now LRG is just a dumping ground for bigger companies like Microsoft. Why would they bother putting something like the next AAA Quake at Best Buy or Target when LRG could just publish it on a website for them and also make a super duper pricey CE that costs hundreds of dollars and you’ll get a year later with a dice roll on if it’s quality or not?

Now we have an extreme amount of games being printed from all of these publishers and limprints, but almost certainly not enough people buying all of them. Eventually, this train is gonna come screeching to a halt, and if the health of some other limprints is any indication, it ain’t gonna be pretty when it does. And the ones who are driving the train can’t even get Tomba’s soul back from a Yu-Gi-Oh card.

This is, as I promise, the final big limprint article I will make. All of the limprint articles I have written to now will be given their own category so you can read for yourselves how I really did want these companies to just do right by their customers and improve the industry. Instead, they hurt physical media, whether intentionally, or not. I only have short blurbs in mind to write if earth shaking events were to take place, but that’s about all I plan to ever mention on this subject again for SFG.

Until next time, thank you for dealing with my ramble. Now go beat Pegasus in a card tournament so you can get Tomba’s soul back HE’S CREEPING ME OUT

WARNING

EMERGENCY ADD-ON DETECTED

Congratulations! The Universe decided to creep up on me as I was finishing this up and having it looked at by peers of mine, for a source tipped me off during the making of this article that uh, Josh has sued Doug, along with the youtuber who made the video alleging workplace allegations I had recommended months and months ago and mentioned earlier in the article.

And because it’s an active lawsuit, and because it was very clearly filed because Josh did not like the video or Doug’s Medium article or the YT video months after the fact instead of when either aspect was new, I had to ice my article right when it got done, so the following must have happened for you to be seeing this now:

1: The lawsuit was thrown out for being fucking stupid

2: The lawsuit was publicly revealed to the world by a news site, prominent person on social media, other person, etc

3: Something else that made people more widely aware of the lawsuit, which meant this article wouldn’t be the first place most would have first heard of it.

4: The Lawsuit is doomed to fail and is clearly horseshit/badly done (This is the one that ended up happening)

So yeah. I’m not gonna go into the entirety of the lawsuit and break it down, since i’m not a legal person, and the two parties who got sued are the ones who should be at liberty to discuss their sides of the story when they are able. But I will offer some thoughts on it and other parts of the dockets I read, which kinda back up some parts I mentioned earlier in the article, and filled in some gaps regarding other things I wasn’t sure on. I am not gonna link the lawsuit here, but rest assured there’s almost a certain chance when the suit is all wrapped up the involved parties will mention it.

Right away, it became abundantly clear, this suit is just silly and amounts to a reactionary tantrum. You do not file a lawsuit waaaaaaay after someone said mean things about you or your company on the internet (nearly a year later!) unless you really want to be petty or have a slam-dunk case, which does not exist here. Josh’s filing comes off as kinda whiny, complaining about LRG’s wikipedia page mentioning Doug’s medium post (why is that critical, are people going to wikipedia and going “holy shit Doug said a mean thing, i’m giving Rock-It all my money now and they’re losing thousands of dollars to him?”), and the LRG video from April existing at all. Instead of you know, maybe suing back in May/June if there was any credibility to the notion of the video being defamatory, Josh waited until August for reasons. Reasons I have no idea why, if I’m being completely honest. Not to mention the lawsuit filing having other baffling bits in it, such as complaints about Doug where one of the things cited is… the fact Doug did not finish High School. This is somehow worthy of including in the lawsuit because…?

Well, I think I know the reason; I was tipped off by a source near the end of the article’s original ending with a rumor that Josh was allegedly being demoted from LRG as CEO, moved to the title of “president” before being planned to be moved out of the company by next spring. I have no idea why this is happening and will not speculate further here. This would give more credibility to why the lawsuit was filed in August, since that would likely be around the time this took place. Thus, it means the lawsuit could very well just be petty retaliation for Josh losing his power and blaming Doug for it, and assuming that because the video creator said similar things as Doug about Josh being a narcissist and alleged he was bad to his employees, that must mean Doug was the sole source of the video’s contents and so they must be sued together.

Except you know, all the people the video creator said he talked to for sourcing purposes in the actual darn video, and the fact that I myself had heard some of this same info before the video or Doug’s medium post took place… And how I personally would never ever let Doug contact me as a source for the reasons I stated earlier in the article, since my own sources/peers told me to not let him. As much as they both were terminally online, Josh and Doug are not the only people to work at or with Limited Run Games. Yeah, I know, shocker, companies have rank and file employees that just want to do good work, get paid and live an affordable life.

Pettiness aside, showing that Josh is truly insane and the rot of this company truly did come from business idiots at the top, I think reading the dockets proved to me some other aspects I heard of that became true, plus some disturbing aspects I don’t have much reason to doubt. Per a counter response to the lawsuit filed by the video creator, in the aftermath of the video going live Josh’s own wife allegedly messaged him to inadvertently confirm some of his findings, along with more sources at/from LRG allegedly reaching out to him to also confirm his findings on the workplace allegations. I still cannot confirm hardly any of these personally, but if it’s in a court document that the allegations are backed up by strong sources, I don’t think that’d be a thing you’d confidently do unless you were certain about it (or the worst defendant of all time and wanting to lose the case badly)

In the aftermath of that though (And the video continuing to gain views), per the counter response, it seems to show Josh’s wife as beyond obsessed with protecting her husband’s online image, due to how much she continued pestering the video creator about it and how unhappy she was with how her husband was being described in it, along with other things they got upset about like the Wikipedia Page. I also have personal reason to believe this is a truthful assessment of her and Josh has never commented on her conduct one way or the other, seemingly content to let his wife roam around the internet bugging LRG critics.

There’s also, most notably, no lawyers from the Embracer Group involved with the suit whatsoever, which you think would be done if this was actually being filed on LRG’s behalf.

I was also given evidence by a source, of multiple instances of Josh’s wife on reddit pretending to be a curious customer wondering why people didn’t like Josh, with a recent comment of hers in the Falcom subreddit being the first known instance of the lawsuit being linked on the entire internet, something you wouldn’t really do unless, you know, you were involved in it or knew the people that filed/were getting sued.

I had also heard allegations from sources in the months post that video going live, that Josh’s Wife had complained to other gaming outlets/creators who mentioned the video or critiqued LRG in some form, offering to get them in touch with Josh to clear things up. I do not have any god damn idea why you would even remotely think this would be a good idea to protect your company’s image and that it’d do anything besides make you and your husband look ridiculous.

Either way, this is just a very, very strange turn of events to end the article on. Going from talking about bad quality control and a Pegasus-involved Tomba Plush, to learning Limited Run’s CEO sued a Youtuber for making a video on workplace allegations, and trying to drag in his ex COO along with it, and possibly even had his own wife rant to people about her husband’s reputation because she didn’t like the video’s allegations.

Maybe all of this could have been avoided if Josh and Doug just listened to feedback and actually gave a single iota about improving their quality over quantity back in 2021, the first fucking time I asked for their quality control and CEO/COO conduct to get better. I deliberately froze this article on ice for over a month to see how the dockets would update and play out, (ie; if the case had actual merit and Doug was somehow doing a collusion/big scheme, since it being Doug, I couldn’t fully rule that out) and having read all the updates since then, I am of the opinion that this lawsuit is absurd and has no merit or shot of actually getting across the finish line the way anyone is hoping it will.

Many of the filings made by Josh’s side are riddled with weird complaints; nuggets of truth about Doug here and there (like how he got fired for misconduct and acted very poorly in response to that;) mixed in with a crapoad of unrelated/weird shit that has no correlation for filing a defamation suit, with most of the reasoning basically coming down to “I do not like that this guy called me a narcissist on a medium blog published over a year ago, by the way, did you know he didn’t finish High School?”

If anything, the only reason the video creator is roped in here at all is because of a ludicrously stupid attempt on Josh’s end to connect dots like on a conspiracy whiteboard to insist that because both the video creator and Doug alleged Josh is an abusive CEO, that must mean the video creator’s sole source was Doug… instead of the many many sources that were mentioned in the video itself and in the creator’s legal response. Because yes, Doug LRG is the only person that would ever have issues with the company that no longer works there. Only him, clearly.

It also begs multiple questions for me, that just all tie this together for points I mentioned in this article on multiple notes; why a defamation lawsuit over old allegation content pieces that were slowing down in views, with the medium piece only even being available via an archive link that surely hadn’t been clicked that much in months? Why not you know, when it was new and fresh if it was actually an emergency damage to their reputation? Why not file a defamation lawsuit over the many times it could have actually had merit, like to the many alt right youtubers baselessly calling LRG staffers pedophiles for firing a transphobic Community Manager in their commentary/rant videos? Did that not actually bother them, but being told “hey your company is ran terribly” did? Are the allegations in the mrixit video actually fully credible and all real, and they want to try and cover it up?

Whatever the case, it just further proves my point that this company is just not well ran at all, and whether or not Josh is on his way out and is suing in a last-ditch desperation, or just for petty “i hate this youtube video saying mean things about my ownership” purposes, I really don’t know how you could have Limited Run’s reputation or even their structure come back from all this. Embracer would have to do a full investigation (as I welcomed in the article I made on that video, since they could find for themselves if the vid was true/false and have more than enough resources to take action on it) and investigate for themselves, and if true, the entire company would basically need to rehire the top brass.

Nevertheless, I never expected to end the article on this note, and whatever comes out of it from here on out will be up to the people involved with the lawsuit. I am not gonna get involved further. I did reach out to some pretty big names in the games journalism space about this and asked to have them look into all of this more, and they can do what they may with the info I could find.

Nevertheless, you all be aware too that this is an opinion piece, since like the others, well… I just sincerely wanted the company to be better. I wanted them to do cool things, realize their mistakes, and fix their fuckups. Both times since that original article, they haven’t, and if anything are actively refusing to do so on purpose. Filing a baseless lawsuit might just be the ultimate proof of all that.

All of this, for Video Games in Plastic Cases.

Seafoam Gaming

Through the Sea of Retro

It’s 2026, and Limited Run Games’ Quality Control is Hopeless

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