This guy either a) did something else to trigger the ban, b) bought a bootleg cart somehow, although that doesn’t seem like it’d be particularly profitable to sell on Switch, or c) hit a seriously weird bug. Or, I guess d) is lying about it?
There’s also option E) bought a used cartridge that was ripped. Those pirated cart rips have to come from somewhere, and rippers have no incentive to hold onto the game carts after ripping them. If Nintendo sees multiple identical game carts online at the same time, it knows the cart is a pirate rip and could easily set up an auto-ban for it. Catching the occasional “I bought a used cartridge and suddenly got banned” complaint would be a drop in the bucket for Nintendo. For all we know, this dude was playing a BOTW cart that was previously owned by a person who uploaded it to thousands of users.
From another article, this seems to be what happened. The cart was purchased via FB Marketplace from somebody who had also cloned it to a multi-cart. Detection likely occurred due to the same cart ID showing active at two places.
Found the comment who know what’s going on plus the gold points redeem below. We know the cart is unique thus I don’t buy used game on grey market for switch.(facebook/craigslist) Too risky.
Yeah, that seems to be what the user is saying happened after talking to Nintendo, the quote just isn’t on this linked report.
They’re also saying they didn’t get much pushback, which may suggest Nintendo do see this from time to time, I guess. Banning accounts/consoles isn’t exclusive to the Switch 2, just more impactful there. They would have been seeing these scenarios for a while.
There’s also option E) bought a used cartridge that was ripped. Those pirated cart rips have to come from somewhere, and rippers have no incentive to hold onto the game carts after ripping them. If Nintendo sees multiple identical game carts online at the same time, it knows the cart is a pirate rip and could easily set up an auto-ban for it. Catching the occasional “I bought a used cartridge and suddenly got banned” complaint would be a drop in the bucket for Nintendo. For all we know, this dude was playing a BOTW cart that was previously owned by a person who uploaded it to thousands of users.
From another article, this seems to be what happened. The cart was purchased via FB Marketplace from somebody who had also cloned it to a multi-cart. Detection likely occurred due to the same cart ID showing active at two places.
Found the comment who know what’s going on plus the gold points redeem below. We know the cart is unique thus I don’t buy used game on grey market for switch.(facebook/craigslist) Too risky.
Yeah, that seems to be what the user is saying happened after talking to Nintendo, the quote just isn’t on this linked report.
They’re also saying they didn’t get much pushback, which may suggest Nintendo do see this from time to time, I guess. Banning accounts/consoles isn’t exclusive to the Switch 2, just more impactful there. They would have been seeing these scenarios for a while.