BRAND ANALYSIS: A IS FOR ANBERNIC

Welcome to our new series, the A-Z of Brand Analysis, in which we review a brand for each letter of the alphabet. We begin with Anbernic, a Chinese handheld gaming company. Stay tuned for the next installment, a brand beginning with the letter B. That one you’ve probably heard of… 

WHAT IS ANBERNIC?

Anbernic is one of many new DTC brands selling handheld video game emulators made in China. With a name that is meaningless in any language – likely created by an AI – Anbernic seems to be an aggregate of Chinese manufacturers presented in the westernized idiom of a brand, in the form of a website, a logo, a color, and a few other basic elements. This branded container helps the products stand out in a market whose main participants are only available through seemingly random sellers on Aliexpress and Amazon.

Anbernic is compelling because the brand is so obviously a perfunctory container for product – while the product is beguiling, asking many more questions than it answers. Anbernic’s approach to marketing began with a celebrity endorsement and ended with the realization that there was enough demand to go direct-to-consumer. 

Anbernic sells devices that allow people to play pirated games, whereas Western brands shy away from the obvious trademark and legal conflicts that arise from that strategy. The most notable example of a similar device in recent pop culture history was the Soulja Game, a viral scam in 2019 that spawned several iconic memes. As it turns out, the brand behind Soulja Game was none other than Anbernic.

For a time, gaming was the convergence of performance and design – there were console wars where Sony and Microsoft would try to outdo each other with provocative ads, radical design and cutting edge technology. Today the open sourcing of many development tools and the atomization of the industry has created a kind of mass indie gaming era where previously unknown developers are able to sell 25 million copies of their game on Steam without any ads or industry connections. 

There are huge communities of people modding and developing – people working outside of the closed ecosystems of Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony – to create new devices, games, and more. This is also reflected by the proliferation of brands like Anbernic that sell devices. Brands following PC logic (as opposed to “Apple” logic) like this are “for the heads,” rising in rank through Reddit and Youtube rather than through traditional marketing. 

WHAT ARE EMULATORS? 

An emulator is a piece of software that allows one computer system to behave like another. For example, the “Dolphin” emulator allows you to play Gamecube games on your computer. Emulators themselves are legal, but BIOs (the system software used to boot) and ROMs (the games) are not. Because a video game console is essentially a computer like any other, many consoles themselves can be hacked to emulate games – you can jailbreak a nintendo switch to run Playstation games, for example.

But in the United States, if you want to play games with an emulator, you have to find a pirate site to steal them – which is what created the opportunity for the Chinese handheld devices. Since old games are so readily available and copyright laws don't apply, you can easily purchase a device that looks like a Gameboy, preloaded with thousands of free games, for under $100. This has led to the creation of a huge gray market where manufacturers now compete to create the cheapest and best hardware.

• Emulator brands represent factory based innovation: Chinese factories invented the hoverboard based on assembling the various parts they were already fabricating. By connecting local factories through a product, anonymous brands were able to make infinite bootlegs indistinguishable from the original

• Emulator hardware is often high quality and an improvement from the original devices they’re based on 

• Third party gaming peripherals used to be notoriously bad, but now they are luxury items at best - There’s a huge market for these devices in all price ranges.

• Emulators are tools for backwards compatibility, allowing new systems to recreate old ones. The game of telephone that emulators play – by copying copies of systems – is at odds with technology’s tendency to be future focused. 

• There are so many emulators to choose from

• They encourage a banal lawlessness and speak to a bygone era of the internet when gray market (torrents, Limewire) was huge 

• The games on emulators are often not the original game but a somewhat modified version of the game; emulation modernizes games and open sources them allowing fans to update and improve or otherwise play with the content. The games become infinite deep fried versions of themselves.

TO BE OR NOT TO BE A BRAND 

In commodified verticals, like Chinese handheld gaming devices, we quickly get to the heart of the matter. What is the true function of a brand? The simple answer is the brand is everything (as it’s the only distinguishing factor and potential source of larger margins) *or* the brand is almost nothing, i.e. a minimum viable coordination point that aggregates (ideally positive) impressions of a product and makes it discoverable. 

Anbernic is in the latter camp. Ayaneo, a competitor, with a doxxed founder and elevated product offering, would be an example of the former. 

The formal requirements of an almost-nothing brand identity are few: an SEO-friendly name (“Anbernic”, a unique word that doesn’t mean anything in any language) and a logo and/or wordmark. Perhaps a 100% lore-free ‘About Us’.

At the same time Anbernic products themself contain next-to-infinite libraries of some of the most valuable IP and entertainment brands that exist today. By sheer quantity and decontextualization (as games are taken out of their native environments), Anbernic also commodifies Super Mario and Final Fantasy, in a manner not totally unlike what streaming platforms have done to our music, old and new. 

These devices also bear a resemblance to the world of luxury fashion superfakes, in which an ever expanding library of better-than-real fakes begins to drown out the legitimacy of even the most iconic brands. Like the world of handhelds, luxury superfakes have a major presence on Reddit, and engage a brand consciousness that goes beyond the mere commercial. Your sense of the brand becomes the legitimizing factor, rather than the commercially stamped and verified one. 

RELATED BRAND AND CULTURAL NARRATIVES

1. Intellectual Property

Emulators are legal, but they act as a gateway into a legal gray area where all kinds of benign crime happens. The Chinese handhelds, like Anbernic, exist between open source products and bootlegs – however legitimizing the the UI / UX may be.  Anyone can create a PC; these PC-like handhelds are primarily used to steal games. We know that intellectual property is a somewhat localized phenomenon (see: the lore around IP and trademark rights in China). Consoles are designed to be closed ecosystems but emulators open walled gardens and allow for cross-platform play.

2. Hardware vs Software 

Gaming hardware used to impose limits on software by turning consoles into exclusive platforms. Certain games ran on certain systems and that was that. Emulators break this system, as does cloud gaming – both allowing cross play between different consoles. It seems games will only become more free and flexible to adapt to whatever platform the customer prefers, which imposes new criteria on hardware, raising the standard for design, components and other quality of life improvements that are related to the physical object rather than the software it runs. Games continue to shrink and become easier to steal. Cloud emulators allow people to remote access a machine for emulation. Game streaming and games being liberated from platforms coincides with the broader trend of new games being free to play. Generally, what makes Anbernic and brands like it money is the quality of the controller and other quality-of-life UX improvements they make relative to ‘name brands’  – even just through expanding the choices available to a consumer. This trend is likely to continue as games become more streamable

3. Time

Emulators are designed to keep the past within reach by making antiquated systems accessible to modern users. They allow people to access and modify the past, destroying the idea of a perfect original by wrenching it into the present. Emulators are a kind of anti-history: instead of owning the original game or console you own a replica that’s been modded. There is no original; sometimes games are updated or tampered with, which can either truly change the game (mod it) or effect something more subtle, creating a scenario where the original is slowly altered like Kanye’s releases. Alternatively, someone can make a new game for an old system. A gray area around IP rights emerges as things get older and become parts of pop culture, like a public domain cultural utility. For example, Doom is so accessible it's the new Pong – you can play it on a lawnmower.