I recently found this out about the PS2 community. There are people making almost 1:1 copies of games and their packaging and selling them for cheaper.
What are your thoughts on this practice?
Personally, I think it could save people a lot of bucks on old, hard to come across games; I also think it sounds very sketchy.
Depends how the discs are produced. One thing is do you need a mod chipped, mechapwned, or swapdisc to play these reproductions which is likely, unless the people got their hands on decommissioned PS2 disc pressing facilities that can press discs with the right wobble grooves for passing legit copy protection scheme in the consoles. But ok, it is fair to assume these discs would not have that, and you at least need to own a method for loading backup/import discs in your system. Maybe the sellers even patch the discs into Master Discs for MechaPWN compatibility that as far as I know does not impact compatibility with modchips either. The next question is are the discs pressed, or DVD-R's. Like I have a topic mentioning this; home recordable disc media fades over time, even non-RW one, with possible range of life from 10-20 years. This is why LRG selling their CD reproductions with proper licensing no less on a CD-R that is an issue when they have a very limited self life compared to properly press manufactured discs, which they should be selling. A company should not have hard time at least commissioning a press run from a factory.
Aside these issues, as long as the deal is honest; seller tells what the product is, the buyer knows, and the buyer wants it regardless, is is not an issue. If sony or publishers find it one, they can take them down.
People who have the morality of selling these kind of things are unlikely going to be transparent, no?
These days a lot of them are, at least depending on product category. Collectors are far too educated to be pushed something that is not legit to them as a genuine article. In Alibaba, if you search for say Mother 3, you will find reproduction GBA cartridges and the sellers tell you it is, and might be also usually just the cartridge. This is, cheaper than a flashcart to get yourself a cartridge of one special game, maybe with english patch too, and sellers being upfront about it makes them deal with less headache than trying to be sneaky about it. This type of dealing at least these days is common. Of course, it wasn't upfront back in 200X.
This also leaves with the fact that you can easily get your PS2 run backups. It is not that hard to have a DVD burner and blank DVD-R's, Hard Drive equipped Fat PS2, MC2SIO or other methods available to you. To me these types of products make sense for cartridges. Though, lack of care manufacturing some of them can present issues. I bought a 5€ repro of english patched Mother 3 myself, which regularly looses it's saves because the save block on the cartridge does not match what the game expects and needs, causing data corruption. Not only that, but often electing to use battery backed up SRAM even in GBA games that did happen for few games, in few regions but is not the norm, and static types of storage, even flash, is used throughout most if not virtually all GBA games.
