Nintendo Files Court Documents To Target 200,000-Member Subreddit SwitchPirates

Nintendo, currently predicting 2024 net sales of $8.4 billion and operating profits of $2.4 billion, is continuing its furious crackdown on those modding or emulating its systems and games. Its latest target, via a story by Game File, is the Reddit sub SwitchPirates, while also asking to subpoena information from a vast array of companies, including Reddit, to identify those involved in so-called “Pirate Shops.”

The Japanese company, which made $16 billion in 2021, is making this move as a follow-up to its case against the subreddit’s moderator, James “Archbox” Williams, claiming it has discovered that many others are involved in the alleged piracy, and wants to identify them by gaining access to business records from Cloudflare, Discord, Github, Google and Reddit, along with domain companies Name Cheap, Go Daddy and Tucows.

This move aims to follow the shutdown of Modded Hardware, one site that Archbox was allegedly associated with, by identifying anyone else involved. In order to be able to do this, Nintendo is requesting access to the information held on the 200,000 members of the subreddit.

According to the court filing, the manufacturer of the $77 billion lifetime revenue Switch console “learned various details about the Pirate Shops and about Defendant’s involvement in them.” The document goes on,

Among other things, we learned that Defendant was active in numerous Discord servers related to the Pirate Shops. We also learned that Defendent was the primary moderator of the “SwitchPirates” Reddit community and apparently was the owner of a Github account directly tied to these activities. In nearly all of these capacities, Defendent operated as “Archbox” or a close variant of that name...

In the course of our investigation, we also became aware of multiple other online actors who appeared to have a role in the Pirate Shops. However, we were unable to determine the identity of locations of these other actors with a sufficient degree of certainty to name them in the initial complaint. NOA thus did not include these individuals in the lawsuit...with the expectation that ordinary discovery...would reveal the identity and location of these actors.

However, because Williams allegedly evaded Nintendo’s attempt to serve him, and then didn’t appear in court, Nintendo argues in its filing that this meant they were unable to find these identities through discovery, and as such is seeking the subpoenas. The company, currently worth $67 billion, says these will be “limited in scope,” designed to identify “the account holders and the sources of any payments made, and where applicable, aggregate traffic and access statistics for Pirate Shops’ websites and related online locations.”

Nintendo is asking Google for access to Google Drive and Gmail data, but doesn’t specifically state its intentions regarding Discord, and the situation with Reddit is detailed as follows:

Reddit, Inc. operates a social media platform where users, often using pseudonyms, may post to different forums known as communities or “subreddits.” Defendant was a primary moderator of the SwitchPirates community, under the name “Archbox,” which boasted more than 190,000 members. Nintendo has reason to believe that other accounts active in the SwitchPirates community may also have been controlled by Defendant, or else reflect other individuals who have worked alongside Defendant.

The Nintendo Switch is the third-most successful console of all time, currently boasting 146 million consoles sold. It looks likely to usurp second-place console at 154 million, the Nintendo DS, over the next year.

.