Nintendo recently updated its account agreements, including a warning of consequences for “unauthorized use.” This could lead to players having their games on the Nintendo Switch or even their entire console temporarily or permanently banned.
What changes has Nintendo made to the agreement? In its updated agreement for using a Nintendo account, Nintendo makes a strict warning about “unauthorized use,” specifically referring to content that is “licensed for personal and non-commercial use only.”
Any unauthorized use of a Nintendo digital product would result in that respective digital product becoming “useless.”
This means that one may neither “lease nor rent nor sublicense, publish, copy, modify, adapt, translate, reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble digital products, unless expressly permitted by applicable law.”
Nintendo defines digital products as: “Digital products refer to all games, applications, software, additional content for games, applications and software, vouchers for digital services, and other digital content and digital services that can be accessed through the Nintendo Account Service.”
With this update, the goal is primarily to take action against a specific group of users that has previously caused trouble.
Bans Against Piracy and Emulators
Which group of users is meant? With the change to the agreement, it is likely that they want to take stronger and easier action against users who rely on so-called emulators and pirate and leak games. Emulators are software that allows users, among other things, to illegally play pirated games that were only released for a specific console on a PC.
What does this have to do with Zelda? In the past, there have been several lawsuits against operators and users of such programs, as well as individuals who have pirated and leaked entire games on the internet. This includes the celebrated The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which was not only shared via screenshots but also as the entire game on the internet about two weeks before its release.
According to Nintendo, the game was downloaded over 1 million times as a result of the leak and was playable on emulators. Such cases have occurred more frequently in the past, although not to this extent.
For example, the content creator “EveryGameGuru” not only streamed numerous pirated games but also explained to his viewers how they could do it themselves. Nintendo subsequently had all of his videos taken down and took legal action against him. Among other things, a sum of around 7 million euros in damages was demanded.
Nintendo is now widely known for vigorously opposing copyright infringements and asserting its rights. They rigorously ensure bans and deletions as soon as they find material that they deem to violate those rights.
In one case, however, this backfired a bit, as it affected a streamer who hadn’t done anything wrong. Nevertheless, she was banned on Twitch for it: Twitch: Nintendo is so desperate to combat leaks that an innocent streamer got caught up in it.
