Nintendo Switch 2 anti-piracy plans are brutal

Thanks to some recently spotted changes to Nintendo’s Account User Agreement and Nintendo Privacy Policy, it sounds an awful lot like the video game giant is planning to remotely brick people’s £400 Nintendo Switch 2 consoles if they in any way suspect that you’re attempting to tamper with them.

As spotted by Game File's Stephen Totilo, an update to the legal agreements that Nintendo requires users to complete (if they wish to access the online services on both Nintendo Switchs and Nintendo Switch 2s) spells danger for anyone who plans to either alter their consoles or pirate their games.

As Totilo notes, these changes to their user agreements are now much, much more intense than they were previously.

The updated agreement now states that anyone who attempts to “bypass, modify, decrypt, defeat, tamper with, or otherwise circumvent any of the functions or protections of the Nintendo Account Services” will potentially see their brand new Nintendo Switch 2 consoles permanently transformed into expensive paperweights.

That’s not some big exaggeration, either. They very literally state that your Nintendo consoles will be rendered “permanently unusable”.

“You acknowledge that if you fail to comply with the foregoing restrictions Nintendo may render the Nintendo Account Services and/or the applicable Nintendo device permanently unusable in whole or in part” states the new Nintendo Account User Agreement.

Oof. That’s… absolutely brutal. But is it actually possible for them to pull something like this off, or is it just an empty threat?

Well, to be frank, I don’t know. Banning Nintendo Switch 2 users’ accounts would be easy, but bricking the console remotely would definitely take a bit more work on Nintendo’s end.

Also, and this is just a bit of a guess on my behalf, I’m not even sure if this is something that wouldn’t be easy to circumvent.

If people figure out how to crack Nintendo Switch 2s and install homebrew anyway, I’m not really sure what would stop them from simply resetting the console and installing a fresh version of its operating system on it.

At the very least it sounds like Nintendo are a bit more serious about cracking down on homebrew and piracy this time around, so we’ll have to see how this all plays out once the console officially drops next month on June 5.