Nintendo’s stance against piracy is well known at this point; the Japanese gaming giant is strongly against piracy and copyright infringements, to say the least, and there’s no shortage of cease-and-desist orders issued by Nintendo to countless emulation websites, fan-remakes, and whatnot.
Recently, Nintendo was able to secure a sentence for Gary Bowser (the man who cracked the security of the Nintendo Switch and sold piracy-enabling software) of Team Xecutor to jail for over three years alongside imposing copious amounts of fines. Now though, some publicly available court documents have revealed that Nintendo might have released a Switch hardware update just to render Bowser’s hacks unusable.
“Nintendo has had to release a new version of our hardware in response to one of these hacking tools, and this modification entailed countless hours of engineering and adjustments to our global manufacturing and distribution chains and, of course, corresponding resources. To be clear, these effects are a direct result of the defendant and Team Xecutor attacking our technological protection measures,” the court documents read (via Axios)
It would seem as though the hardware update in question is the 2018 refresh of the base Switch model, which added extra security to the system’s Tegra chip to enable protection against the hacks. According to Nintendo, this cost the company $65 million dollars in damages.
