this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2025
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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?
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.