Did a Reddit moderator pirate Nintendo games? A $4.5 million lawsuit says he did

Nintendo has filed a lawsuit against an individual it says is a moderator on Reddit, accusing him of piracy and facilitating a network of websites that offered pirated Nintendo Switch games.

The video game publisher is seeking $4.5 million in damages from James C. Williams, who went by the username “Archbox” on the social media site. (That account has since been suspended.)

“Williams not only copied and distributed Nintendo game files without authorization; he actively promoted their distribution and copying to thousands of others across a variety of websites and online ‘communities,’ and knowingly trafficked in unlawful software products aimed at circumventing Nintendo’s technological measures protecting against unauthorized access,” Nintendo alleges in the lawsuit.

The filing claims Williams used Reddit to send thousands of messages, steering people to piracy websites and to help people modify their Switch consoles. In exchange for his services, he asked for “donations” of Nintendo eShop gift cards, the company alleges.

Nintendo says it initially sent a cease-and-desist order to Williams in March of 2024, telling him to “shut down his pirate shops.” But Williams ultimately denied involvement with the sites and became “combative,” eventually deleting his posts, many of which were on the subreddit “SwitchPirates,” where Williams was cited as a moderator, the suit alleges.

Williams is alleged to have made “hundreds or thousands of copyrighted Nintendo Switch Games” available for download. In its filing, Nintendo lists 30 specific titles that were pirated.

While $4.5 million is a significant sum, Nintendo says in the filing that it could easily have demanded more. It based the amount it is seeking on other piracy cases, including one in which Bungie Software, creators of the Halo franchise, were awarded millions in damages for piracy sales.

“Here, the amount of money sufficient to remedy NOA’s injury would be extremely difficult to quantify; but it is indisputable that such an amount would be large,” the filing reads. 

Nintendo is serious about piracy

Nintendo has taken an aggressive stance against piracy for years. 

Dolphin, an open-sourced emulator for the Nintendo Wii and GameCube, was a target of the gaming giant in 2023 when its developers announced plans to put its emulator on the Steam game distribution platform. Nintendo sent a cease-and-desist order to Valve, which pulled the listing. Days later, Dolphin’s developers announced, with “much disappointment,” that it had postponed the Dolphin release indefinitely.

“Nintendo is committed to protecting the hard work and creativity of video game engineers and developers,” a spokesperson for Nintendo told the gaming news website Kotaku in May of 2023.

Last year, the company successfully shut down the Yuzu emulator, saying the team behind it had “facilitate[d] piracy at a colossal scale.” The Yuzu team agreed to pay $2.4 million and ended all operations.

Earlier this year, Nintendo updated its user agreement, informing Switch owners that if that console is found to contain pirated games or modifications, Nintendo has the right to remotely render the system useless.

Should users “bypass, modify, decrypt, defeat, tamper with, or otherwise circumvent any of the functions or protections of the Nintendo Account Services,” the update read, Nintendo might make that “applicable Nintendo device permanently unusable in whole or in part.”

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