Well I guess I didn’t mean to rush into another opinion article so soon but boy, when something reverberates so much that I don’t have to be on social media to hear about idiotic takes and puffing up someone who is objectively not a good person, and just a certain site continuing to pretzel itself into covering something it maybe should reconsider (at least to the extent that its doing), and when the timing is right after I published a review of something owned by the company in question (and how I handled that in comparison)… well I guess you get another set of anti-Saudi ownership ramblings about SNK. I’ll try to not make this a bible length thing, and honestly it’s less about the ownership for this piece (you all know my stance on that anyway and heard why their ownership is problematic), and more of people’s reactions to it, or rather lackthereof and the sheer ignorance that sort of behavior displays.

So, to keep things shorter than I would if I was fully unleashed and went all out all night until my arms broke off, SNK and a company called Plaion announced a Neo Geo AES replica last week. Not yet another plug and play with built in games, or a shoddier replica like the Neo Geo X from ages ago, but a near 1:1 replica with AV out and a bunch of ludicrous things that nobody would have predicted. Reprints of the memory cards? OG controller ports? AES carts being fully reprinted for a much lower price?

In an alternate universe, I’d have been up there with a fully loaded preorder of the ultimate edition or whatever since it had Pulstar and Twinkle Star Sprites, two of my favorite games. But we are not in that alternate universe. We are in the universe where SNK are fully owned by the crown prince of Saudi Arabia’s company, and said region has openly influenced recent games and moves from SNK as of late to the point it’s undeniable. Thus, SNK is linked with a region with a long history of human rights abuses, anti LGBT support, and destabilizing rhetoric in the region that’s gone as far as to influence the thing causing your gas price to skyrocket since late February. This is not a debate, this is fact.

Yet annoyingly to me, it sure feels like whenever SNK anything comes up in the news, a lot of outlets and people in general seem skittish and nervous to address the elephant in the room or even understand how to cover it. Do you just, not at all mention it? Or do with disclaimers? Or do as if nothing changed?

For me as a solo website owner, who does not have a staff, never plans to hire one, and isn’t exactly in the market for expanding advertisement revenue and thus needing to cover as much as possible in order to keep a site viable, I decided to just not do it outright. Nothing SNK released would be a game I’d ask for review or pick up, and if I wanted to pick it up, I’d plan to do so via the used market way after the fact and not give it any promotion. Not too hard to do. The exception very recently was the Neo Geo related Evercade products, since when I started my Evercade review series I explicitly mentioned reviewing every cartridge and every EC related hardware I could get my hands on. Thus, I did my roundabout “wait six months after launch, get it from a reseller/used listing, and then review it so it has less of an impact vs a near launch review.” workaround so i cover those products, but less importantly and with less of my money going to SNK. Checks a box on the review list and I can move on, and I can also slap a big disclaimer in said review to let people who genuinely do not know/aren’t aware that yes, SNK’s ownership situation really did get this bad. I will make that disclaimer bigger for each complaint I get about that.

Like, obviously I’m not gonna be surprised if a super mega huge website mentions it, especially sharing a PR of a product announcement, that’s pretty standard. I am more irked though on a personal level from the amount of youtubers who just immediately repeated the info and pumped out vids on the product though, just for the sake of getting more views from covering the “hot new retro announcement”. It’d be one thing if say, a Neo Geo die hard that reviews all Neo Geo products had to cover this since it *is* the first new official Neo Geo hardware in decades, but your average retro youtuber covering this without mentioning their ownership is doing their viewers a disservice, I feel.

Either way, that’d be where my usual ramble would end and thus mean I’m not doing an article tonight at all, but I’m doing so anyway because a series of headache inducing events just led me to be blunt with a certain website’s comment section pretty much going toward all-out war over this issue, with some of the dumbest takes from supposed “professionals” I’ve seen in a long, long time, and I’m glad that’s getting called out a plenty today.

A site I have mentioned in the past critically, (but am being nice tonight, and will not mention by name now) did a pretty wimpy “opinion piece” about the ethical nature of supporting modern SNK due to their new ownership. I think this sort of thing in general is good for more sites to write and I wouldn’t have a problem with it as a concept. What I do have a problem with is the framing, which pretty much points out the disturbing expansion of the Saudi PIF and how they’ve gone after a lot of the gaming market to the point some of it is getting really hard to avoid. (Pokemon Go for instance, I’ve had for a decade; I can’t cut the game off outright due to its ties with Pokemon Home/my long account history, but I sure as hell can no longer spend money on it, and play it way less than I used to.)

They cite someone who points out a lot of people were awfully quiet and too eager to just guzzle up the newest Neo Geo AES+ news, and frame that as its own side, leading to said website author trying to excuse their recent (genuinely good, I may add) decision to no longer cover the Stupid Evil Gameboy Clone but still cover SNK stuff the way they have essentially in the vein of “they have a longer history in the gaming industry”.

Personally, I’d just have, if I had to make any article on that site at all about it, made an article with the press release announcing the thing and drop it, not keep posting article after article after article promoting it including a friggin buyer’s guide with affiliate links. It more or less reeks of “oh shit people got mad at me so I gotta damage control to not seem like a hypocrite”. Worlds of difference between covering a cartridge in a lineup of other cartridges you also cover with their games in it for another device, and covering an expensive ass thing they directly have control over and thus the fully owned government-backed company gets more input and promotion over it.

But whatever, I know I’m an abnormal writer by just doing things 100% solo my own way where I’d just not promote the thing, and I could give benefit of the doubt if the article was mainly stopped there and basically went “hey it’s good to be aware, what do you think, sound off in the comments.”

But no, they had to make it worse and absolutely mindnumbingly stupid, and said author invites… someone I really would name under other circumstances but luckily tonight i’m again, too nice, so I’ll just leave this individual unnamed, to give a comment offering the “opposing side” to the person who makes the point of people being a bit too carefree promoting a thing owned by a destabilizing regime, where his opposing view is essentially “lol money goes to bad stuff all the time who cares, what about politicians and taking bad PAC money, you should boycott taxes too if you hate them”, as if those things are remotely the same, with one of those being a thing you must do or you go to jail in the country, the other being an electronic video game toy you don’t need to live. Hell, you could just buy it used months later if you really want it!

It’s the same stupid, braindead mentality that led to our current moment in history as a whole (with people in the US digging their heads in the sand, then oh shit, realizing the past year and a half that local politics matters a whole fucking lot and we’ve been complacent as a society for far too long, so now we gotta play catchup while minorities have already been aware of that for decades now), and it’s also not lost on me that it was quickly shared around social media how the same dude cited as the “other side” in the article went in the comments section of that site a day before on a tirade of a rant about people who cared about SNK’s ownership situation, with the dude proudly boasting he only cared about if the system accurately plays games or not and amounted to the complaints otherwise as insignificant whining. Instead of just saying nothing at all, or just going “I’m curious to see how this system turns out and looks forward to it”, he just outright acted like a wackadoo.

And it took no less than very simple searches of his name to find many examples of that guy being banned from multiple gaming forums, multiple gaming outlets, and multiple locations for poor behavior or making his right-leaning viewpoints incredibly obvious. But sure, the dude can be a frequent contributor for this website and is still a totally reasonable person because he wrote books interviewing Japanese game developers. I’ll gladly write down notes that my Tomie interview could have given me permission to fall down a bad pipeline to become a shitty person if I didn’t snap outta it, because hey, I did a big deed!!! I’m giga epic!!!

But sure, let’s say despite all that, a terrible article, terrible “both sides” framing of a not hard issue to discuss, (SNK Ownership bad, company still has rich history of plenty of great games you can enjoy other ways or later down the line with some patience, awareness is good for you to make up your mind the most you can, let’s not have a dude that goes on wild rollercoasters about eugenics as one our main sides of discussion) you just think it’s a silly thing and you’d click out and not think of what the fuck you just read ever again.

Nope! Comment section became all out civil war, with said opposite sider debating in the comments, whining about harassment at the slightest brush of pushback, and too many people outing themselves as dweebs by going “I dont care about politics, dont mention politics here, i just wanna read about video games”, as if Tariffs didn’t literally shake the entire gaming world a year ago this month to the point several outlets looked silly back then by not naming the thing that was the cause of gaming prices shooting up, probably because they were either scared of wackadoos or just wanting to be boring and “neutral”. For a site network that quickly speedruns to lock comments at any mention of the US President out of fear of getting yelled at by wackos (instead of just, i dunno, modding them and permabanning people, but that would mean some reliable commenters would be permabanned, oh no!!!), they sure didn’t mind having people be openly transphobic and throw whataboutisms at each other in the comments; each new comment meant more views! Number go up!!!

It was one of the dumbest comment sections I’ve seen in my entire life, and reaffirms my stance a year ago on calling out the idea of having that community mark eShop games as “shovelware” or not for their eShop clone that petered out. And it was not lost on me seeing that the people going “no politics in vidya” were either blatantly aligned with the right on their other postings/socials, or people just stubbornly, adamantly against any engagement with politics whatsoever. I’m not here to tell people to do a thing a certain way or that if you don’t go in your local community a certain amount of hours you suck, but I will say that if you, in the year of our lord 2026, still do not get that video games and political events in the world are intertwined, you will get a hard reality check one day. If tariffs last year somehow weren’t it, then maybe it’ll be this war, or maybe it’ll be the AI bubble bursting, who knows. This isn’t like an out of nowhere place to drop a “political” topic, either; SNK’s ownership has directly impacted their recent Fatal Fury game. It’s not like if I were to burst into my Disney Afternoon review randomly ranting that Russia is bad and should withdraw from Ukraine, even though the two have no correlation with each other. That’s an immersion breaker that’s outta place, not “hey SNK is owned by the bonesaw guy, you should know that before making your decision on this neogeo replica”

For me that stubborn, selfish “politics aren’t gaming adjacent, writers talking about them are silly, I want games to be my escape and they have nothing to do with the real world at all” mindset dropped for me in 2020, as soon as the Turbografx Mini got delayed and it made me realize in my small rural American bubble that “oh shit, this COVID thing is pretty serious actually and I have to pay attention to this” and made me pull my head out of the sand. But for those who had those moments, and leave their heads buried or add more sand over their head to avoid having to actually think of other people or factors besides themselves, they’re inevitably in for a rude awakening when the real world strikes in some fashion and your games/gaming industry is impacted, even if you think being fully self-centered and privileged by other factors will save you.

In my community, I have a critical crisis with hospitals in rural areas and a bunch of bad budget cuts; i could just ignore all that and play games, like I did until the end of 2024 (outside of social media posts just saying “this guy is bad!” )o r I could also do what I’m trying to do more and getting involved in my local community in my spare time, meet people, deconstruct as much as I can from my past, bad mindsets from a place of living in a small town my entire life, to mitigate harm and help others in the community, so that I and others can live longer and healthier to enjoy said games in said community, instead of everyone sitting on their ass as our area loses funding and healthcare quality.

The past year+ I’ve deconstructed a lot as one who’s been trying to better myself as a person, and no company or product is perfect, we pretty much all know that by now. I’m not gonna atomize anyone who buys this thing casually, but I do really insist they at least be aware of what they’re supporting and do their best to mitigate the damage or find something else they can help with to make the world a better place. Donate to Human Rights Watch, buy from small local businesses, find another cause you can back, even if it’s just a single issue you’re real passionate about, support homebrew devs and indie games, (there are even NeoGeo indie games that rock! You don’t need to buy a new AES cart via SNK to still get something new and cool for the platform!) If we all did that, so much would be better. Whataboutism and acting like that one comic of “yet you participate in society” will get us absolutely nowhere.

I’m not perfect either with my stances on things, but I try my best to improve, be the best, and stick to the issues I focus on since avoiding every unethical thing in existence is impossible. But for stuff that’s easy for me to cut off (Starbucks, SNK, Xbox, Nicalis etc), I sure can do that and play a tiny part. Likewise, I know there are cases like Nintendo Switch Online that yes, do give a portion to SNK due to their games being on the SNES service; I don’t like that either. I don’t like their smaller investments in other companies, (and will gladly cut off each and every one they get full ownership of) and that’s why I just ask you do the best you can, be aware and make your own choices. Don’t be a snarky chud.

Just maybe, for the love of god, don’t hire wackadoos to “both sides” human rights abuses and crash out in your comment section to your gaming website, especially if they’ve been banned by a lot of other peers in the industry. Writing a book or landing impressive interviews don’t make you immune from criticism for shitty takes.