Nintendo Sues Reddit Moderator For Alleged Switch Piracy, Seeking $4.5 Million In Damages

By Elijah Gonzalez | October 7, 2025 | 11:30am

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Nintendo Sues Reddit Moderator For Alleged Switch Piracy, Seeking $4.5 Million In Damages

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Nintendo is up to its usual schtick of attempting to bury those who pirate their games in millions of dollars of fines. As noticed by OatmealDome on Bluesky, after issuing a lawsuit last year, Nintendo is looking for a default judgment (when a judge decides the outcome of a case if a defendant fails to respond) against James “Archbox” Williams in a case regarding Switch piracy. Specifically, they are looking for $4.5 million in monetary damages.

Nintendo accuses Williams of creating, operating, and promoting a network of “Pirate Shops,” as they put it, which were used to distribute pirated Nintendo Switch games for free. Williams was allegedly a moderator on the SwitchPirates subreddit, where he is accused of asking for “donations” of Nintendo eShop gift cards so he could purchase additional Switch games to pirate. Nintendo claims that Williams was involved with several Pirate Shops, some of which offered reward tiers for donating eShop gift cards that would provide access to additional games. The lawsuit also accuses Williams of being the lead member of MissingDumps, a community focused on receiving eShop gift cards to purchase games that hadn’t been pirated yet.

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In the legal documents, Nintendo claims that it contacted Williams in March 2024 to demand that he shut down his Pirate Shops. They allege that Williams “acknowledged his conduct violated NOA’s rights and stated that he would work with NOA [Nintendo of America] to satisfy its demands.” That said, Nintendo claims that “he did not, however, agree to cease his conduct, and in fact denied his involvement with the Pirate Shops in several respects. When NOA requested that Defendant confirm in writing that he would comply with NOA’s demands, he became combative and uncooperative.”

Williams then apparently deleted much of his online presence, including his GitHub account and social media posts. After Nintendo gave him a final chance to comply on May 17, 2024, he allegedly stated that he would have an attorney reach out to NOA, which they claim didn’t happen that month. Nintendo then filed a lawsuit in June 2024, accusing him of copyright infringement via copying, distributing, and promoting unauthorized Nintendo game files, and also of promoting means of circumventing Nintendo’s anti-piracy protection. While his attorney did contact the company in January, they said that they didn’t receive further contact afterwards.

Nintendo’s legal team arrived at the $4.5 million figure in damages because the Copyright Act states that, instead of calculating direct damages, a copyright owner can instead seek $150,000 in damages per willful infringement. Nintendo chose to focus on the copyright infringement of 30 first-party games, which they accuse Williams of copying and distributing, among the “hundreds or thousands” of other games they allege he infringed on.

Nintendo continues to pursue an aggressive legal strategy against what they consider copyright infringement: they’re currently suing Palworld developer Pocketpair for infringement on patent rights, established a seemingly spurious patent over summoning monsters to fight in games last month, won a case against a console modder for $2 million, had the US government shut down a piracy site in July, and, perhaps most infamously, gave hacker Gary Bowser a $10 million fine and 40-month prison sentence, alongside the stipulation they could apparently take 25-30% of his monthly gross income for the rest of his working life. Of course, that same aggressive legal strategy mostly seems to appear when it comes to one-off modders and hackers, and not when the US government seemingly blatantly infringed on its copyright for the sake of xenophobic propaganda a few weeks ago.