Game Industry Group Asks US Trade Office to List Anbernic as a Notorious Piracy Market

The Entertainment Software Association, the trade body for the US video game industry, has asked the Office of the US Trade Representative to put Anbernic on its 2026 Notorious Markets List. In a filing dated 7 October, the ESA nominates Anbernic.com, the handheld maker's own store, and describes retro handhelds sold with preloaded game cards as the video game industry's version of "superfakes". TorrentFreak reported the filing on 12 October.

What the ESA filed

The submission answers the Trade Representative's annual call for nominations, filed on regulations.gov under docket USTR-2026-0529 and signed by Catie Shawley, the ESA's counsel for intellectual property protection and security. It sorts its nominations into lettered groups, and Anbernic is the only entry in the first, headed "Piracy Devices". The other groups cover cracking groups, repack sites, torrent sites, marketplaces for game accounts and items, and cheat sellers, among them the Denuvo cracker voices38, FitGirl, DODI-Repacks, RuTracker, G2A and Cronus Zen.

The case against Anbernic is short. The filing calls Anbernic.com "the official retail website for a widely distributed line of handheld emulation devices" and says the devices "are routinely offered or shipped with removable memory cards preloaded with hundreds or thousands of unauthorized copies of copyright-protected video games published by ESA members." It says those copies reflect the circumvention of copy protection on members' games, and that the company's own site operates alongside sales on Amazon and eBay, which give the products "the indicia of legitimacy associated with established retail channels."

To show scale, the ESA says Anbernic has operated for about nine years, generally releases eight to ten new models a year, and sells devices for roughly $40 to $200. It puts traffic to Anbernic.com at about 1.4 million visits in August 2026, and cites a 2024 case in which Italy's Guardia di Finanza in Turin seized around 12,000 Anbernic devices containing more than 47 million copies of pirated games, a figure the filing sources to a Reuters report. Its conclusion is that Anbernic "normalizes hardware-based piracy by delivering illicit catalogues through a polished consumer product".

Why "superfakes"

The word comes from the Trade Representative, not the ESA. Each year's list has an issue focus, and the Federal Register notice published on 26 August says the 2026 review "will examine issues related to high-quality counterfeit trademark goods known as superfakes or superclones." Last year's focus was piracy of live sports broadcasts.

The ESA's filing adapts that idea to games. It argues that illicit plug-and-play consoles and handhelds "are the functional equivalent of superfakes": molded housings, colour screens, polished menus, retail packaging and listings on familiar shopping sites, while "their commercial appeal rests solely on a concealed memory card or internal drive" loaded with unauthorised games. It adds that such devices take sales from "compilations, subscriptions, remasters, and licensed retro hardware", and raises security concerns about firmware from unknown supply chains and the lack of parental controls.

The filing then asks the Trade Representative to urge governments and marketplaces to treat preloaded game libraries as core evidence of commercial-scale piracy, inspect bundled and separately shipped memory cards, make sellers prove they are authorised to include the games, suspend repeat sellers and their linked storefronts rather than single listings, and improve customs targeting for devices tied to preloading.

What Anbernic's own store sells

Anbernic's store does sell its handhelds with optional extra cards. The RG 35XXPro, for example, is listed with 64GB of storage on its own at $54.99, or bundled with an additional 128GB or 256GB card at $84.99 and $104.99. The product description does not mention preloaded games. It lists the emulated formats, from Game Boy and SNES to PS1, PSP and Dreamcast, and says users can download games in those formats, naming a third-party game downloader app called RixelHK. The listing does not say what, if anything, is on the bundled cards, and the ESA filing does not distinguish between cards sold by Anbernic directly and cards included by third-party sellers.

Retro Handhelds, which covered the filing on 12 October, says this is apparently not the first time the ESA has flagged Anbernic, but it is the first year the Trade Representative has put a special focus on superfakes. Pocket Tactics points out that rival makers Retroid and Ayn sell their devices without preloaded games.

What the list can and cannot do

The Notorious Markets List is not a ruling. The Trade Representative's own notice says the list "does not purport to reflect findings of legal violations", and it carries no penalty in itself. It is meant, in the words of the office's March 2026 release, to "increase public awareness and help market operators and governments prioritize intellectual property enforcement efforts". The office first named notorious markets in its annual Special 301 Report in 2006, and has published the list separately every year since February 2011. The 2025 edition named 37 online and 32 physical markets.

Reporting on what a listing would mean for Anbernic varies. Retro Handhelds notes the Trade Representative could decline to treat Anbernic as a superfake, and that any action would most likely concern the preloaded cards rather than the hardware, with possible effects on US warehouses and on Amazon and eBay listings. Pocket Tactics describes the worst case as pressure on US retailers to stop selling Anbernic products until the company stops packing cards with games. Both are outlets' assessments; neither the ESA nor the Trade Representative has said what would follow.

What is not known yet

The reports on the filing cited here include no response from Anbernic, and the ESA's submission does not say which Anbernic models or sales channels it examined. Rebuttal comments on the docket are due by 21 October at 11:59 p.m. Eastern, so Anbernic or others can still answer the nomination on the record. The Trade Representative decides which nominations make the final list, and has not said when the 2026 edition will be published; the 2025 edition came out on 3 March 2026. Whether the list names Anbernic, and whether it adopts the ESA's framing of preloaded handhelds as superfakes, is the thing to watch.