Piracy is generally frowned upon, even if some developers aren’t so strict about it, but in the case of Nintendo it seems that the company is taking piracy very seriously. According to reports, it seems that Nintendo is now starting to ban certain certificates issued to game cards by checking to see if they might have been illegally obtained.

While it is Nintendo’s right to fight back against piracy, there are many gamers out there who are questioning what will become to the used game market as a result of this. Right now gamers are reporting that only the gamecart’s certificates are banned, not the Switch itself. As you might have heard, a report from last month revealed that Nintendo had gone after modders/hackers by banning their Switches from online play.

https://twitter.com/SciresM/status/1009436235536871424

Of course it wouldn’t be fair for Nintendo to prevent the Switch from working entirely, so banning players from online play was probably the next best thing. That being said, it is unclear as to what Nintendo’s policies are regarding resale of used/pre-owned games, because like we said it could have been a legit purchase but the system could still potentially see it as piracy. Either way we’ll have to wait and see if Nintendo plans on clarifying how they are approaching this.