Nintendo is suing streamers for allegedly airing “pirated” copies of Switch games before their official release

Nintendo has filed a lawsuit against a person who appears to have repeatedly streamed “pirated and emulated” Switch games while simultaneously promoting “Switch emulators and other piracy tools” to its audience.

As 404 Media pointed out, Jesse Keighin (known online as “EveryGameGuru”) is said to have “got under Nintendo’s skin” after refusing to comply with the video game giant.

Keighin is accused of escalating the situation by continuing to stream Switch games (including new titles). before they were published), monetized his video content, and even bragged about his exploits in a letter to the Japanese company.

“To October 24, 2024After certain platforms blocked his illegal streams due to Nintendo’s enforcement actions, he sent Nintendo a letter bragging that he had “a thousand burner channels” to stream on [he] ‘can do this all day,'” Nintendo says in its lawsuit.

The most recent example of this was last month when Keighin allegedly streamed Mario & Luigi: Brothership on “YouTube and other platforms.”

The lawsuit further claims that he “streamed gameplay footage” of several new games “at least fifty times” before they were even available to the public:

“On at least fifty occasions over the last two years, Defendant streamed gameplay footage of pirated copies of at least ten different Nintendo games without authorization – all before those titles were made available to the public.”

According to the lawsuit, he had also previously told Nintendo that he would “actively help people find newer and updated copies” of popular Nintendo emulators, and he was accused of offering to help people play Switch games. on your PC” without having to buy the official Switch hardware.

Nintendo is now looking $150,000 per infringement of its copyright” and taking into account “at least fifty cases in the last two years,” this comes to a total of $7.5 million.