if anyone's interested a thing I did recently was flesh out the Bootleg Games Wiki article on Powkiddy with some research I did on the history of their brand and the beef they had with Anbernic's main guy. Mostly not documented in English before https://bootleggames.fandom.com/wiki/PowKiddy
SNK by the way has supposedly been on the warpath in China against companies that bundle pirated NeoGeo games. Again this is mostly rumour but it's said that they took out Pandora's Box and Helegaly entirely & others were raided. Anbernic signed a licensing agreement with them, probably under duress
@lion i've started taking notice lately of correlations with Saudi interests - Capcom, SNK, EA, and EVO are all part or majority owned by their sovereign wealth funds now, and probably some other stuff I haven't noticed. The new AES+ console screams "subsidized" to me. I might be reading too much into it but this rumor aligns with a narrative of bargaining to secure control of the prestigious brands and IP. In this case it would be that they got China aligned with them on an advantageous IP regime.
there was some other stuff i couldn't really pin down, apparently they were penalised for copyright infringement in 2024 but the sources are region blocked. it was also rumoured that trouble with SNK caused their retreat from games consoles in 2025 but it also might've just been market conditions