In a followup to my video last week in regards to tariffs hitting US customers of Temu and Aliexpress, we now turn to industry impacts. One micro-industry I cover frequently here on the channel, retro gaming, is getting hit particularly hard now that their costs are going up 145%. Many of these makers rely on overseas manufacturing—primarily in China—because domestic production either isn’t possible or would make the product unaffordable.
In my latest video we talk to Nick Mueller from HDRetrovision, a maker of high-end AV cables for original game consoles.
Nick begins by telling me they had a new shipment of cables ready to go when the new tariffs were announced, and they had to ask the factory to hold the order indefinitely. They simply couldn’t afford to absorb the 145% increase in the cost of their inventory nor pass it along to customers.
Their cables come over by ocean freight in small pallet shipments, and every batch takes about four to five months from order placement to warehouse arrival. That long lead time means there’s no way to “rush in” inventory before a tariff takes effect.
HDRetrovision’s cables aren’t just wires in a jacket. Many include internal electronics, like potentiometers for brightness adjustment and precision audio circuitry. The factory they work with primarily produces medical-grade devices, and their QA process is intense. They even built custom mechanical test rigs that clamp down on the cables and run automated checks through FPGA microcontrollers to ensure voltage levels and signals are within spec—before and after the final cable assembly. If a tiny component is misaligned, the entire cable is scrapped.
Nick told me that when they started the company—initially through a Kickstarter campaign—they seriously explored U.S. manufacturing. What they found was that domestic options couldn’t meet their quality standards, and costs would have been two to three times higher. And that was before tariffs. Despite the push for reshoring, there’s no infrastructure here for low-volume, high-complexity consumer electronics manufacturing at this scale.
Now, with tariffs in place, they’re pausing all new imports and considering warehousing future inventory in Canada to avoid the immediate impact. They’ve even toyed with the idea of moving production to a different country, but that comes with a yearlong lead time to find, vet, and test a new factory—and no guarantee that country won’t end up subject to tariffs too.
Unlike big players like Microsoft, which recently raised the price of their Xbox Series S by around 26% (presumably absorbing some of the tariff cost), small companies don’t have the luxury of scale. And while the tariff structure exempts products like smartphones and computers from the steepest rates, niche items like HDRetrovision’s cables aren’t spared. There’s no lobbyist knocking on the White House door on behalf of retro gaming hardware. As Nick put it, “This isn’t capitalism. It’s crony capitalism.”
The irony here is that these are American-designed products. They were conceived, prototyped, and engineered here—but there’s no viable way to manufacture them domestically at competitive cost or quality. And now, as Nick bluntly put it, “It’s basically a non-starter for us to even exist under these tariff conditions.”
They expect to have inventory into the fall, possibly up until Black Friday. After that, if nothing changes, shelves could go empty. Even if a trade deal is struck tomorrow, it’ll take months for his supply chain to spool back up. And with every company in the same position, there’s no guarantee that their factory—shared with clients producing medical devices—will prioritize video game cables when production resumes.
It’s a sobering reminder that policies aimed at global strategy often have very local consequences. If you’re someone who values quality and preservation in retro gaming, HD Retrovision’s situation is worth paying attention to. Their cables are still in stock—for now (compensated affiliate link).
