A site that sold Nintendo Switch "mods" for playing pirated games ordered to pay millions in damages

Petteri Pyyny
8 Sep 2025 15:45

Nintendo has zero tolerance for piracy on its consoles, and the Japanese giant is well known for relentlessly taking piracy-enabling sites and companies to court.
And with rather good results.

Now, Nintendo has scored another win in its battle against piracy: a U.S. court has ruled (PDF) that a well-known site selling so-called mods must pay millions in damages.
Modded Hardware sold physical devices - "mods" - that allowed the Nintendo Switch to run games other than Nintendo's originals. The most infamous product on the site was the MIG Switch, which let users dump full images of Switch games onto a memory card and play them directly from it.

While the MIG Switch and similar products could technically be used for backing up and playing legally owned games, the court sided with Nintendo, concluding that the main audience for such devices are those who use them to play pirated titles.

The court stated, in essence:

Defendant's conduct has caused NOA significant and irreparable harm. For example, the MIG Devices, Mod Chips, Hacked Consoles, and Circumvention Services allow members of the public to create, distribute, and play pirated Nintendo games on a massive scale. Thus, the MIG devices, Mod Chips, Hacked Consoles, and Circumvention Services harm NOA's goodwill, detract from NOA's consumer base, and enable widespread illegal and difficult to detect copying.

The site and its domain were also ordered to be transferred into Nintendo's ownership. In addition, Modded Hardware and its operator were ordered to pay two million dollars (about 1.7 million euros) in damages to Nintendo.

Nintendo's increasingly tough stance against piracy and its enablers has made headlines in recent years. Perhaps most controversially, Nintendo recently updated its user agreement to state that it reserves the right to remotely and permanently disable any console found to be running pirated games. That change, however, does not apply in the EU.

Earlier this summer, Nintendo successfully shut down the massively popular NSW2U site, which had distributed full disc images ("ROMs") of Nintendo games.

At times, Nintendo's actions have also hit non-commercial projects. The company managed to force the shutdown of the hugely popular Nintendo Switch emulator project Yuzu, an open-source project that allowed Switch games to be played on PC.