Nintendo Can Brick Consumers’ Nintendo Switches for Emulation Suspicions
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- Nintendo updated its 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.
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 states 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; this directly interferes with emulation, which requires accessing both the hardware and software of a device. The 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.”
Nintendo’s exact method of discovering tampering or emulation remains unclear. On April 29, 2025, Nintendo did implement a firmware update that reportedly accidentally bricked users’ devices. The update targets preparation for the Nintendo Switch 2.
