The funny thing here is, the patent is up anyway and if someone in china wanted to make some molds and put out cases... they could. Not sure there's that much demand for them though. Like for myself, no third party case was going to replace an original saturn case (I was into Saturn, never had a SegaCD).
The one time I'll defend Josh... The problem of all things like this is volume and upfront cost.
No one in China was going to cough up cash to make cases for a dead system. But if say some American was going to pay the upfront cost for the molds, then they would absolutely take their money, then likely sell the molds (or make two+, likely charging the American for them!) and let someone else take the risk of cranking some out at a pittance of the price the US vendor charges.
People act like OMG IP LAW?! But it's really just about upfront capital costs. Yes, for high dollar stuff, China will attempt to reverse engineer it, but for cheap stuff, they'll let someone else fund their own knock off market for them.
The answer is partially what Josh did. He could keep manufacturing local OR price in the cost of competing with knock offs through quality control (lol), customer service (lol), and branding when using a Chinese manufacturer.
So ya, he was right to be worried, but didn't really follow through on his part either. If all he wanted was to fix his collection and maybe make a quick buck, he should have gone to China. Otherwise, doing boutique manufacturing in the USA is bonkers expensive and you're not going to recoup costs unless you're lucky.
