Yet another reminder of the superiority of the Steam Deck and PC as a whole.
Don’t forget piracy!!
He got banned for a ridiculous reason and still says
Nintendo support is amazing and will help get you back up and running
That bully sure is nice, he did a great job cleaning up my nose bleed from when he punched me in the face!
Just keep supporting them though because Nintendo == childhood
And the Nintendo of my childhood was responsible for pretty much every anti-consumer practice and cultural trend concerning videogames during my childhood:
Inventing the idea that videogames are toys only for little boys only for marketing purposes. Betraying and exploiting established relationships with developers. Screwing over partners on disc technology and reversing course to limit technology to be under their control. Supporting Jack Thompson throughout his campaign to ban all videogames with any adult content at all. Lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit to hold the entire industry back. The list goes on.
you forgot:
- making it mandatory for any 3rd party game to stay exclusive to the NES for 2 years, essentially giving themselves a monopoly
- suing to make cheating devices like the game genie illegal (they failed, thankfully)
- suing to make game rentals illegal (they also failed)
- introducing the lockout chip, normalizing walled gardens on consoles, as well as region locking
Wym only for boys, don’t you remember the sparkly pink “🌟✨✨🌟 Game Boy Advance SP Girls Ediiitiiooooonn 🌟✨✨🌟”
/s
b-b-but don’t you get it! i can justify the scam cost to myself with mental gymnastics!!! I have to buy the Switch 2. It can not be avoided, I must buy the Switch 2. I have to.
It’s always been this way with Nintendo, even way back. I did a backlight mod to an original DMG-01 Gameboy yesterday and they used tri-wing screws to secure the case, those things suck and are only used to keep consumers out.
How to get your Nintendo account un-banned
Why? At this point, I would throw all Nintendo hardware in the garbage. Let it stay unbanned than support such a shitty company.
Eh… I am going to be on the Doubt column on this one until someone gets more information and other cases.
From my understanding of the way Switch carts are made there is no difference at all between a cart used on a console and the same cart resold for a different console. Nothing is stored to tie carts to hardware or accounts. Carts are meant to work with the multiple accounts on the Switch and with multiple Switch consoles at once, given that Nintendo very much expects to upsell you on a Mini/OLED/Switch 2 whatever.
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?
Nintendo is definitely not looking to ban used Switch 1 carts. They literally have no way to do so. There is no tool in the toolset to distinguish a cart someone else bought at the store from your own carts you bought at the store and then moved from a Switch 1 to a Switch 2.
At the absolute most I could entertain that the used cart had been used to make a backup and then the backup got flagged in a different jailbroken console or something, but I don’t even know that Nintendo would be able to tell or that it would trip up their banhammer.
That doesn’t mean I’m on board with their remote bricking policy, and if this turns out to be a bug or weird edge case it’s just another thing to show that their overreach is not gonna play the way they thought it would.
But it is almost definitely not an attempt to ban users for buying used games.
EDIT: Looking at other reporting, it seems the user in question themselves hypothesized that the cart must have been dumped and said Nintendo requested proof of purchase to un-ban them, so I guess that’s the most likely scenario?
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.
Nothing is stored to tie carts to hardware or accounts.
Do you remember the discontinued gold points program? For any brand new physical cartridge you could claim equivalent to 1% the game’s price. Obviously the points could only be claimed once, by a single account. This seems to point pretty strongly to carts being uniquely identifiable and to Nintendo’s ability of keeping track of usage.
They used a code-in-box for that on physical releases, IIRC. The carts are identifiable, but they´re not tied to an account, that I know of.
I recalled differently so I looked it up. Here’s a video of a random person claiming their points. No code-in-box, just the console phoning Nintendo with cartridge inserted.
Huh. Guess I misremembered that. It’s been a while since I looked into it.
In any case, the point stands. The carts are identifiable but not tied to an account. They clearly keep some record of who (optionally) registered each cart for these purposes, but carts can still be used across multiple unrelated accounts and consoles simultaneously and Nintendo still has no way to differentiate a first purchaser using a cart across consoles/accounts versus someone having re-sold a cart.
IMO it’s probably most likely an overzealous bootleg detection system hitting a false positive or someone selling a really convincing bootleg.
Don’t get me wrong, Nintendo absolutely wants to kill the used market. Iirc multiple executives have been on record voicing opposition to the used game market. But I definitely think it’s more likely that they got a false positive on the “is this game pirated?” detector and nuked the console.
Given that there are no good sources of Nintendo storage out there I don’t know how profitable it’d be to make a bootleg single-game cart when you could instead sell the same hardware as a flashcart. Used Switch games aren’t that expensive anyway. I guess it’s technically possible, though.
A false positive is almost weirder, because what does a false positive look like? A false positive on what test? Admittedly I have no idea of how they’re ID’ing flashcarts to ban them. What they have clearly works, but without knowing what the technique is I can’t tell if a false positive is even possible. The “bought a cart that had been used to make a known dump” theory is… possible, but I’d need more proof than just sounding more plausible than anything else.
Either of those hypotheses shows that their EULA overreach has practical implications that they should have considered, but it’s fundamentally different from what the article is putting forward.
…the way Switch carts are made there is no difference at all between a cart used on a console and the same cart resold for a different console.
IIRC every cartridge has its own cryptographic key and can be uniquely identified. When it became possible to dump game cards and load them on a flash card, there were reports, that it is possible, that this might lead to a detection - as the flashcards need to replicate this key. Now, Nintendo might have no way to tell if you lend the game to someone, of the other switch that uses it bought the game from you, etc. BUT if it is pirated, it’s possible to detect, when the original and the copy are played at the same time, as the cartridge cannot be physically in two switches simultaneously. There were never any reports, that someone really got banned because of this, though…
Yes, maybe the seller dumped the cart and is still using it via emulation. Now, the buyer used the same cart with the same crypto key and Nintendo detected two uses at the same time.
Both the carts and the digital downloads are signed, but the cart signature is not stored with the account or associated to it, to my knowledge.
With digital games you can run them on two Switch consoles at once and, while that has been complicated by the “virtual cards” it would not ban you, it’d just kick you out of the game.
I can’t promise that they aren’t flagging physical cards showing up in two places at once. That is possible, as I said above. I am just not aware of that being a thing that they do, and it would not be Switch 2-specific, so it’d be surprising we only hear about it now.
It could be that this guy got himself a bootleg cart, but that sounds expensive to create for how cheap used Switch games are, and you’d get dinged on the flashcart, period, it wouldn’t necessarily require the game to appear in two places at once.
So it’s not that I’m saying this didn’t happen, I’m saying I don’t know what happened or why just from what is currently being reported.
They’ve been flagging physical carts showing up in multiple places at the same time since the very moment the first Switch flashcart appeared (so likely before we ever had our hands on any). Places discussing the flashcart had been talking about increased detection and bans for a year or so.
It was even done on the 3DS before that. The 3DS had a whole tiny niche ecosystem of people selling “private headers”, dumping only the unique per cartridge info and selling it with the promise that they’d only sell any given header to one person. That too had a few instances of normal people complaining about bans with pre-owned games.
Right. I think the confusion stems from the linked article framing this as someone getting banned for using a second hand Switch 1 game on a Switch 2.
What actually seems to have happened is someone bought a dumped cart, got their account banned when it was flagged for not being unique and then had a relatively easy time of getting customer support to unban them when he called to explain he actually did own the physical cart.
From that perspective it all makes some sense, it’s just not what Metro decided to report, I’m assuming due to being swept into reports of resold bricked Switch 2s.
You missed one possibility.
e) The guy is telling the truth.
Can’t rule anything out
Well, no, the dude telling the truth is the first bunch of letters. The point is how the thing that he’s telling the truth about actually happened to him.
The more they think they own the console after I’ve purchased it, the more resistance I have to getting one.
Same always bought my kids Nintendo. I am resistant to the switch 2 and rather proudly my teenager came and told me they are not impressed with Nintendo’s practices and does not want it.
This console is gonna be a hard no from me. If I can’t own my stuff they don’t get my money.
