$150,000 per game: Nintendo's Archbox verdict is a message, not just a fine

Thirty games, $150,000 each. That's the math behind the $4.5 million (about £3.4 million) a US District Judge has ordered James Williams to pay Nintendo - the former Reddit moderator known as "Archbox" who ran r/SwitchPirates, a community that grew to nearly 190,000 members.

The case itself didn't end with some dramatic courtroom showdown. Williams simply never answered the lawsuit Nintendo filed back in June 2024, so the court issued a default judgment. Judge Lauren King also pointed out that he couldn't really claim he didn't know about it, since he had at one point hired a lawyer to fight a Google subpoena connected to the case. On top of the money, there's a permanent injunction: no more distributing Nintendo games or tools for getting around the Switch's copy protection.

Nintendo's lawyers tracked him down largely through his own Reddit posts, and the complaint accused him of running several pirate "shops" offering free downloads of Switch libraries since 2019. Put that next to Gary Bowser ending up behind bars and the Yuzu emulator being shut down, and the pattern is obvious. Nintendo doesn't go after individual players. It goes after the people who make piracy convenient, and it picks the maximum statutory damages to make sure everyone else is reading the headline.

Will Nintendo ever see that $4.5 million? I'd bet heavily against it. Default judgments against private individuals are often more about deterrence than collection. The number is the point.

Now, the angle that interests me more. Anyone who has browsed local classifieds here knows that "modded" Switch consoles, often sold with a memory card full of games, have been a normal sight for years. The logic behind it is easy to understand: Nintendo's first-party games famously hold their price long after launch, and when a full-price game eats a noticeable chunk of an average monthly paycheck in our region, some people do the math and go the other way.

I'm not defending it. Developers deserve to get paid, and a modded console comes with its own risks, from bans to bricked hardware to sketchy firmware nobody vets. But a US court fining an American moderator won't do much about a guy selling a chipped console two towns over. What would actually move the needle is fairer pricing, more frequent discounts on older first-party titles and a healthier legit second-hand scene. Physical cartridges that you can resell or lend to a friend remain the best legal way to play on a budget, and that's a good reason for Nintendo to keep physical releases alive.

The Archbox verdict shows Nintendo will keep swinging the legal hammer. The question is whether it also plans to make the legal option easier to swallow for people who aren't earning in dollars.

Image: Evan-Amos / Public domain, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nintendo-Switch-Console-Docked-wJoyConRB.jpg