Nintendo wins court order banning sale of Switch piracy devices

Nintendo just convinced a Dutch court to ban the country’s least charming export since tulips: the MIG Switch, a cartridge that’s really just an SD card slot in a costume.

And that costume trick is just one front in a much bigger campaign. Nintendo has spent 2026 chasing piracy down every channel it can find. Last month they wiped out hundreds of Switch emulator repos from Github in a single afternoon. This time, the target wasn’t code on a server but physical cards up for sale, the kind that would arrive in a buyer’s mailbox within a week, and a Dutch court just agreed they shouldn’t be for sale at all.

The Hague District Court ruled this week that selling MIG Switch Cards and MIG Switch Dumpers is unlawful.

The case went against a dropshipper who ran the devices through three websites while the actual stock shipped in straight from Asia. Judges ordered the seller to stop offering the cards immediately, along with anything else built to sneak past the Switch’s defenses.

Nintendo framed it as a win for small studio whose sales a pirated cartridge quietly siphons off. In a press release shared by NintendoLife, they said: “Nintendo initiates these actions not only on its own behalf, but also on behalf of the many video game developers globally that depend on legitimate sales of Nintendo video games.”

Funnily enough, Dutch courts have seen this exact argument before. The same bench banned Nintendo DS “R4 cards” back in 2010, and Nintendo dug that 16-year-old win straight back out for this press release. The legal logic held up too, since judges leaned on a European precedent that treats a device’s only real purpose as reason enough to ban it.

It’s the same fight on the other side of the Atlantic too. Just last September, a Seattle court ordered MIG Switch seller Ryan Daly to hand over $2 million and shut his site for good.