Somewhere deep in the bowels of Nintendo’s legal dungeon, a team of lawyers got together and decided that merely banning you from playing online wasn’t enough punishment for daring to touch your own hardware.
No, that was too quaint. Starting May 2025, thanks to a delightfully dystopian update to the Nintendo User Account Agreement, your beloved Switch, or its yet-to-be-born sibling, the Switch 2, can now be executed remotely. Not locked, not banned. Bricked. Kaput.
This new policy update quietly slipped into the user agreement like an eviction notice under your door at midnight, was spotted last week by Game File. It details a new standard of corporate punishment: if you so much as look at the internals of your console the wrong way, Nintendo might just euthanize it.
The updated agreement carefully expands the definition of Nintendo Account Services to include “video games and add-on content,” which in legalese translates to “everything we can control, we will.”
Under the new regime, if you’re caught modifying, reverse engineering, decrypting, or otherwise refusing to color inside the corporate lines, Nintendo reserves the right to brick your console into a $300 paperweight.
And lest you think you have to actually do something wrong first, oh no, friends, their new powers are preemptive. From the EULA: Nintendo can suspend or disable your access if they merely believe a violation is going to occur, or if they find it “reasonably necessary for legal, technical or commercial reasons.”
Meaning: “If we feel like it, we will.”
Let’s unpack what qualifies as a “violation.” Pirated games are obviously on the list because downloading 15-year-old ROMs is the greatest threat to the modern game industry, or so the guys at the top keep insisting. But the crackdown isn’t just on piracy.
The EULA also bans modifying or tampering with your system in any way. Install a custom theme? Brick. Add homebrew to make the console do something Nintendo forgot to include? Brick. Use a third-party cart to back up your legally owned games? You get the idea.
They’ve even thrown in verbs like “adapt,” “translate,” and “decompile,” which would make the act of understanding how your own hardware works a violation. The only thing missing is “looking at it funny.”
The mechanism of this console execution hasn’t been detailed yet. Whether it’s a remote kill switch, a firmware bomb, or a visit from the Nintendo Secret Police is anyone’s guess. But make no mistake, this is a declaration of war on anyone who treats the hardware they bought as something they own.
Nintendo’s message is loud and clear: you don’t own that Switch. You rent it. With conditions. And they can revoke your lease at any moment, with or without warning.
This isn’t about piracy. Nintendo already has tools to ban modified consoles from online services, which was arguably harsh but at least stopped short of a full lobotomy. This new policy is about something more basic: control. Absolute, top-to-bottom, mother-knows-best control. And if that means nuking a few devices from orbit, well, it’s the only way to be sure.
So the next time you consider installing a custom app to read eBooks on your Switch, or playing a fan-translated version of a game Nintendo never bothered to localize, remember: you might be committing console seppuku.
At a time where you can’t even trust your gaming console not to turn into a brick because you tried to breathe near it without Nintendo’s written consent, maybe it’s time to start asking some harder questions about what “ownership” actually means in the digital age.
Because at this point, it looks a lot like renting, with the landlord holding the keys, the detonator, and the moral high ground.
