Video Game Piracy Enters New Era as Japan Arrests Its First Alleged Modder of Nintendo Switch Consoles

Video game piracy has entered a new era as Japanese police have arrested, for the first time, someone accused of modifying Nintendo Switch hardware. As reported by NTV News and translated by Automaton, a 58-year-old Japanese man was arrested on January 15 on suspicion of violating the Trademark Act. He is suspected of modifying Switch consoles to run pirated games before selling them.

This was allegedly done by welding modified parts to the circuit boards of second-hand consoles, enabling them to run pirated games. The man is accused of loading the hardware with 27 illegally accessed games and selling the consoles for ¥28,000 (around $180) each. He has admitted to the charges and is currently being investigated for other possible violations, according to police.

Video game companies like Nintendo have long battled with piracy. A takedown request in May 2024, for example, saw Nintendo target 8,500 copies of Switch emulator Yuzu after the emulator itself was taken down two months prior. Its initial lawsuit against creator Tropic Haze claimed that the $70 game The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Nintendo's premiere video game release of 2023, had been pirated one million times before it was even released.

Legal action like this is becoming increasingly common in an effort to combat piracy. Other successful lawsuits include those against game file sharing website RomUniverse, which was ordered to pay $2.1 million in damages to Nintendo in 2021, while a similar case saw it receive more than $12 million in damages in 2018. Additionally, Nintendo blocked the GameCube and Wii emulator Dolphin from releasing on the PC game platform Steam.

This week, a patent lawyer representing Nintendo shed light on the company’s approach to piracy and emulation, discussing how the propagation of emulators could lead to software piracy. Nintendo's Assistant Manager of the Intellectual Property Division, Koji Nishiura, stated: “To begin with, are emulators illegal or not? This is a point often debated. While you can’t immediately claim that an emulator is illegal in itself, it can become illegal depending on how it’s used.”