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The story
During riots in France, game shops were ransacked and merchandise was looted one item after another — but a photo claiming “this was the only title nobody took” went viral on social media, and it became a hot topic on 5ch’s Hardware/Industry board (Geha). The post reportedly racked up over 160,000 likes, but the thread didn’t end as a simple joke about the game just being unpopular. Users pointed out a contradiction: the age rating shown in the photo looked like the US ESRB system rather than France’s PEGI standard, sparking a deeper investigation into whether the image itself had been fabricated.
What people said
Guess it's in the lineage of Wilds — games you could enjoy without ever buying them
Just how much does everyone hate this piece of crap game
lol way too optimistic
Anyone can tell it's fake at a glance, yet someone still made a thread out of this…
If Mr. Wolverine works as a talisman against evil, couldn't we make riot gear out of this and use it to stop rioters?
No rioter can stand against a hairy old guy in a yellow full-body suit farting his way toward you
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HT82SgYWoAAKnht.jpg
Seriously, where does this thing actually sell
Some uncharted "Other-land" (a meme nod to sales-chart categories lumped under "other")?
The photo on the left perfectly captures the exact moment it hits the glass
No human photographer could pull that off
Ah I see, so only the left one's fake lol
Same as in sports photography these days — you shoot video first and pull a still frame from it afterward
It's not like this is a landscape photo
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
In French-speaking regions, age ratings use the PEGI system, while the US uses ESRB — the standards differ, and so does the display format on game packaging. What the thread picked up on was that the rating display shown in the viral photo looks like the US format rather than the French one, which casts doubt on the very premise that this was “a real photo taken on location.” On top of that, some pointed out that the composition — clearly catching the exact moment of impact against the glass — looks unnatural for a news photo snapped in the heat of the moment, raising the possibility that it could be a still frame pulled from video, or even an AI-generated image, leaving the truth divided. What readers might easily misunderstand is that the catchy claim “only this one game escaped the looting” tends to spread as if it were established fact, when the thread’s real focus was actually the question of whether this even happened at all.
*This article is composed as an excerpt and summary from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry (Geha)) thread “[Sad News] Looks Like Only One Game Wasn’t Looted at a French Game Shop.”
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