Nintendo Can Brick Consumers’ Nintendo Switches for Emulation Suspicions
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- Nintendo updated their user agreement for the Nintendo Switch to include harsher punishments for emulation.
- The user agreement allows Nintendo to brick a consumer’s Nintendo Switch, rendering it unusable.
- The original agreement was far more lenient and less detailed.
In Nintendo’s updated user agreement for the Nintendo Switch, Nintendo now has legal precedent to render a consumer’s Nintendo device permanently unusable – this is assuming they break the user agreement, which was recently updated. Nintendo Life has a full posting of the agreement. The official agreement concludes by stating the following:
“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.”
The agreement prohibits Nintendo Switch users from modifying, bypassing, tampering with, or decrypting any functions – directly interfering with emulation, which requires accessing both hardware and software of a device. Their agreement lists out various more legally constricting clauses.
The original agreement was far more lenient and less detailed. Here is the original agreement, which had been effective since April 2021:
“You are not allowed to lease, rent, sublicense, publish, copy, modify, adapt, translate, reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble all or any portion of the Nintendo Account Services without Nintendo’s written consent, or unless otherwise expressly permitted by applicable law.”
As for Nintendo’s exact method of discovering tampering or emulation, it remains unclear. On April 29, 2025, Nintendo did implement a firmware update that supposedly accidentally bricked user’s devices. The update targets preparation for the Nintendo Switch 2.
