from the nintendon’t dept
It’s no secret that Nintendo is among the most draconian actors when it comes to intellectual property. Techdirt is rife with posts on the various ways the company has been a royal and overreaching pain in the ass on anything with even the most modest concern over copyrights, trademarks, or patents. From attempting to unmask anonymous internet denizens over leaks, to failed lawsuits against South American grocers over nonsense trademark concerns, to finding literally any reason to sue a competitor over patents that never should have been granted just because it can, the company simply never misses an opportunity to treat its own industry and fans poorly at the hands of its lawyers. This has even included threats to brick its customers’ consoles if they fail to agree to new EULAs after the console had been purchased.
That last one is particularly notable, as Nintendo is once again issuing a similar threat, but this time with a new EULA that outlines all the things, including legal things, that might cause Nintendo to turn your Switch or Switch 2 into a paperweight.
First spotted by Game File (readers may encounter a paywall), Nintendo has recently changed its online user agreement in multiple consumer-unfriendly ways just before the launch of the Switch 2. Chief among them: Nintendo asserts the right to render your console “permanently unusable” if it determines you’re in violation of the agreement.
Nintendo’s specific new phrasing, distinct from its prior EULA from 2021, is that “You acknowledge that if you fail to comply with the foregoing restrictions Nintendo may render the Nintendo Account Services and/or the applicable Nintendo device [emphasis mine] permanently unusable in whole or in part.”
So what might so offend the company that they would remotely disable the device you bought? Some of it is what you’d expect. Don’t circumvent its anti-piracy protections. Don’t pirate its games.
These still aren’t kosher (more on that in a moment), but then there’s this.
Publish, copy, modify, reverse engineer, lease, rent, decompile, disassemble, distribute, offer for sale, or create derivative works of any portion of the Nintendo Account Services.
The old EULA had some of this language, but it was inclusive of language that such acts had to violate local laws to be verboten. This new EULA includes no such language which, as PC Gamer rightly points out, is a pretty big problem.
The sections I most take issue with are the prohibitions on copying, modifying, or decompiling software—particularly as it no longer accounts for it being “expressly permitted by applicable law”—as well as hardware/software modifications “that would cause the Nintendo Account Services to operate other than in accordance with its documentation and intended use.”
No game or hardware modding, no extracting ROMs—something Nintendo continuously asserts we cannot do, even though it is a legally protected consumer right—and no dual booting to another OS.
Nintendo is once again asserting rights it doesn’t appear to have, at least in America. In what world can someone sell me a thing and then make the thing unusable because it doesn’t like a legal action I took with it? Do we own this fucking thing, or do we not?
Worse yet, the EULA makes it clear that Nintendo is judge, jury, and executioner on these matters. There’s nothing in the language about bricking your device that indicates Nintendo is going to go to any legal authority or third party before doing so. If it suspects you’re engaging in a forbidden (by Nintendo only) activity, the company can brick your shit.
So what happens when they’re wrong?
There’s also the very legitimate concern of the notoriously heavy-handed, litigious company acting on false positives. I don’t know what means Nintendo has to detect such activity and kill a console, but I’m getting a clear message: You spent $450 on this hardware, but Nintendo does not think you own it.
That there hasn’t been a bigger uproar over these changes is plainly absurd. They’re so anti-consumer as to be ridiculous and all of this is practically begging for interdiction from the federal government, assuming the Trump administration hasn’t hollowed out the government’s ability to protect its own people from this sort of thing.
But anyone buying a Switch 2 when its released is at risk of having an expensive paperweight otherwise. You’ve been warned.
Filed Under: bricking, eula, ownership, piracy, switch, switch 2
Companies: nintendo
