Every budget handheld listing screams a number: 15,000 games! 20,000! As if more is automatically better. It’s the most successful piece of nonsense in the entire market, and I think it’s funny that we all just nod along.
What that number actually is
A pile of ROMs of wildly varying quality, often including bad dumps, duplicates, prototypes, hacks, region variants of the same game counted five times, and a long tail of titles no human will ever play. “20,000 games” frequently means “a few hundred games you’d recognise and 19,000-odd entries padding the count.”
The quality problem
The stock cards these come on are notorious. Community wikis flatly recommend not using the preloaded ROMs because they’re frequently corrupt or poorly dumped. The big number isn’t just inflated — a chunk of it doesn’t even work.
Nobody has ever finished 20,000 games. You will play maybe forty of them seriously, and you know it.
Why it barely matters
Here’s the twist: the number is irrelevant because you’ll curate your own library anyway. Wipe the card, install good firmware, add clean dumps of games you actually want, and the count becomes meaningless. The R38S’s real game library is whatever you decide to put on it.
The point
Stop letting the headline number influence your purchase. Judge a handheld on its screen, its sticks, its firmware support, and its build. The game count is theatre. The curated card you build yourself is the actual product — and it’ll be a hundred great games, not twenty thousand mediocre ones.