A collector in the US once sent a small shop an unusual offer. He wanted a limited-edition controller that was only sold in China. Forwarding agencies had quoted him painful prices, so he made the shop's owner a deal: get it for me, and I'll pay you extra for the trouble.

The owner said no to the extra money. Just cover the controller and the shipping, he said, and I'll take care of the rest.

To understand why a customer offers to pay more than the asking price — and why a shop refuses it — you have to understand what Eth hunts.

Eighty Controllers Deep

Eth is a PC player from the US who spends his time in Apex Legends and Rocket League, playing on a 360Hz monitor with the kind of setup that takes latency personally. But his real obsession isn't any single game — it's controllers. Especially the ones most people will never own.

He started collecting in March 2023. His first third-party controller was a GuliKit KK2, which he wanted to use on his Xbox — so he bought an adapter to make it work. Ask him what draws him to limited editions, and he doesn't dress it up:

Today, his collection sits somewhere between 80 and 90 controllers. "Few people have more than me," he admits — though he names two fellow collectors, manbun and toomanycontrollers, who "both give me a run for my money."

And here's the thing about hunting on this scale: he doesn't have a single daily driver. "The thing about having so many controllers is you get to jump around," he explains. "Which can mess with consistency, but eventually you learn to adapt quickly." Current favorites in the rotation include the Void GENESIS and the GameSir G7 Pro 8K — plus a growing number of custom boards.

The Old Way: Expensive and Slow

Eth's GadgetHyper story begins with a leap of faith. "I spent $600 on a whim," he laughs, "because I had no clue about Nagi or GadgetHyper yet." Those first orders went smoothly, and soon he was following every bit of controller news he could find.

That's when a friend told him about the ZD O+ Excellence. "It sounded like the perfect roller for me," he says. There was just the familiar problem: it was a China exclusive.

He knew the old way of solving that. He'd imported gear from China on his own before — successfully, to be fair, never scammed — but it always came at a price. Forwarding agencies weren't cheap, and the waits could be brutal: his longest was around three months. When he priced out the forwarding route for the O+ Excellence, the numbers were just as painful.

Then he noticed that Nagi, GadgetHyper's owner, was active on Reddit. So he asked.

Just Pay for the Item and Shipping

Eth didn't just ask for help — he offered to pay for it. On top of the controller and shipping, he was ready to hand Nagi extra money for the trouble of acquiring it.

"Being the humble guy Nagi is, he declined the extra payment," Eth recalls, "and said I can just pay for the item and shipping."

The O+ Excellence arrived in the US packaged beautifully, without a single issue — no three-month wait, no forwarding fees, no anxiety refreshes of a tracking page.

Think about what that moment means to a collector. The hunt for limited editions is full of friction: markups, middlemen, the quiet tax everyone expects to pay for access. Eth had budgeted for that tax. He tried to pay it. And a three-person shop on the other side of the world simply wouldn't take it.

The Guy Who Points People In

Eth didn't keep the discovery to himself. He started a Reddit group chat for fellow hunters of the O+ Excellence, and it turned into a buying club: "We exclusively bought all our stuff from Nagi before he had it on the site," he says, "and especially after he did."

He's lost count of how many collectors he's pointed toward GadgetHyper since. One of them, as it happens, was KieroKaro — the Polish collector whose fifty-controller wall featured in our previous Community Spotlight. The message that started that story, "I have heard you can provide some controllers from china"? It was Eth who told him so.

After all this, does he have any complaints about the shop? One, and it's a gentle one: "Maybe we could see them a little more in the server," he says, "but I know they are busy serving people worldwide."

Not a Controller at All

Eth has spent years chasing controllers most people will never see in person — through forwarding agencies, three-month waits, and a collection that's outgrown easy counting. But ask him to sum up GadgetHyper in a single sentence, and the hunter answers like a man who's finished a different kind of search:

The limited editions on his shelves are the trophies. But the rarest thing he's found in this hobby isn't a controller at all — it's a shop he never has to second-guess.

If you're hunting something that only exists on the other side of the world, come say hello in the GadgetHyper Discord. Someone there has probably been through it before — maybe even Eth.