this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2025
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Eh... I am going to be on the Doubt column on this one until someone gets more information and other cases.
From my understanding of the way Switch carts are made there is no difference at all between a cart used on a console and the same cart resold for a different console. Nothing is stored to tie carts to hardware or accounts. Carts are meant to work with the multiple accounts on the Switch and with multiple Switch consoles at once, given that Nintendo very much expects to upsell you on a Mini/OLED/Switch 2 whatever.
This guy either a) did something else to trigger the ban, b) bought a bootleg cart somehow, although that doesn't seem like it'd be particularly profitable to sell on Switch, or c) hit a seriously weird bug.
Or, I guess d) is lying about it?
Nintendo is definitely not looking to ban used Switch 1 carts. They literally have no way to do so. There is no tool in the toolset to distinguish a cart someone else bought at the store from your own carts you bought at the store and then moved from a Switch 1 to a Switch 2.
At the absolute most I could entertain that the used cart had been used to make a backup and then the backup got flagged in a different jailbroken console or something, but I don't even know that Nintendo would be able to tell or that it would trip up their banhammer.
That doesn't mean I'm on board with their remote bricking policy, and if this turns out to be a bug or weird edge case it's just another thing to show that their overreach is not gonna play the way they thought it would.
But it is almost definitely not an attempt to ban users for buying used games.
EDIT: Looking at other reporting, it seems the user in question themselves hypothesized that the cart must have been dumped and said Nintendo requested proof of purchase to un-ban them, so I guess that's the most likely scenario?
Do you remember the discontinued gold points program? For any brand new physical cartridge you could claim equivalent to 1% the game’s price. Obviously the points could only be claimed once, by a single account. This seems to point pretty strongly to carts being uniquely identifiable and to Nintendo’s ability of keeping track of usage.
They used a code-in-box for that on physical releases, IIRC. The carts are identifiable, but they´re not tied to an account, that I know of.
I recalled differently so I looked it up. Here’s a video of a random person claiming their points. No code-in-box, just the console phoning Nintendo with cartridge inserted.
Huh. Guess I misremembered that. It's been a while since I looked into it.
In any case, the point stands. The carts are identifiable but not tied to an account. They clearly keep some record of who (optionally) registered each cart for these purposes, but carts can still be used across multiple unrelated accounts and consoles simultaneously and Nintendo still has no way to differentiate a first purchaser using a cart across consoles/accounts versus someone having re-sold a cart.