166
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2025
166 points (98.8% liked)
Technology
39548 readers
262 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
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?
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.