Nintendo Wins $2M Against MIG Switch Seller Who Fought Without a Lawyer

Nintendo of America filed a lawsuit in July 2024 against Ryan Daly, the Michigan-based operator of Modded Hardware, an online storefront that sold the MIG Switch flashcart, the MIG Dumper, modded Nintendo Switch consoles pre-loaded with pirated games, and related circumvention services. The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in Seattle, accused Daly of six charges including trafficking in circumvention devices and copyright infringement in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The case ended in a decisive win for Nintendo on September 5, 2025, when the court signed a joint stipulation and final judgment ordering Daly to pay $2 million in damages and imposing a sweeping lifetime permanent injunction.

The case stands out in Nintendo’s long enforcement history not only for its outcome but for Daly’s approach to it: he chose to represent himself without a lawyer against one of the most IP-aggressive gaming companies in history, denied all wrongdoing, filed 17 separate affirmative defenses, and ultimately lost everything including his business, his website domain, and $2 million. It followed Nintendo’s $2.4 million settlement against Yuzu emulator developers Tropic Haze in March 2024 and forms part of a broader enforcement campaign that has also seized ROM sites and pursued streamers who broadcast pirated games.

Nintendo vs. Modded Hardware Lawsuit Timeline and Updates

What the MIG Switch Is — and Why Nintendo Targeted It

The MIG Switch is a flashcart: a device shaped like a standard Nintendo Switch game cartridge that slots into the Switch’s game card reader like any legitimate game. Unlike an actual cartridge, it contains a microSD card slot. Users can load ROM files of Nintendo Switch games onto the microSD card, and the Switch reads the device as though it were a real game cartridge. The companion product, the MIG Dumper, allows users to create ROM dumps from their own physical game cartridges.

Nintendo’s position is that the MIG Switch violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act because it circumvents the technical protection measures Nintendo builds into its game cartridges and console authentication systems to prevent unauthorized copies from running. While proponents argued the device had legitimate uses — creating personal backups of legally purchased games — Nintendo’s complaint made clear it viewed the primary use case as piracy, noting the device enabled users to play pirated Switch titles without purchasing them. After updated firmware extended MIG Switch compatibility to the Nintendo Switch 2, Nintendo’s enforcement posture became more aggressive.

March 2024 — Nintendo Contacts Daly, Agreement Reached

Nintendo contacted Ryan Daly in March 2024, threatening legal action unless he ceased selling the MIG Switch, MIG Dumper, modded consoles, and related circumvention services through Modded Hardware. Daly agreed to stop. He told Nintendo he was looking for a new lawyer. Nintendo gave him time to comply.

He did not comply. Modded Hardware continued operating. That decision set the trajectory for everything that followed.

July 2024 — Nintendo Files Lawsuit in Seattle Federal Court

Having waited for compliance that never came, Nintendo filed a formal complaint against Ryan Michael Daly in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in Seattle in July 2024. The complaint accused Daly of six charges, including trafficking in circumvention devices under the DMCA, copyright infringement, and related violations. Nintendo simultaneously filed a second lawsuit against James Williams, also known online as “Archbox,” who operated several pirate ROM distribution shops, including Jack-in-the-Shop, Turtle in the Shop, NekoDrive, and LiberaShop.

The Modded Hardware complaint alleged that Daly had sold modded Switch consoles with pirated games pre-installed, not just the circumvention hardware itself. The combination of selling the tools and selling pre-loaded pirated content strengthened Nintendo’s case considerably. Nintendo sought damages, an injunction requiring all unlawful activity to cease immediately, and the removal of all mod chips and MIG devices from sale.

Late 2024 — Daly Represents Himself, Denies All Wrongdoing

Daly chose not to hire legal counsel and represented himself pro se throughout the case. He filed a response to Nintendo’s complaint denying any wrongdoing and listing 17 affirmative defenses. The defenses included fair use, invalid copyrights, unjust enrichment, and fraudulent inducement. He also argued that his products were legitimate backup solutions rather than piracy tools, a position he maintained publicly on social media and in court filings.

Legal observers watching the case described his decision to proceed without a lawyer as unusually bold given Nintendo’s legal resources and track record. Nintendo had previously extracted $2.4 million from the Yuzu emulator team, won a $10 million judgment against Gary Bowser of Team Xecuter, secured criminal convictions against other circumvention device sellers, and seized multiple ROM distribution sites with FBI assistance. Daly’s pro se representation drew significant media attention, with some coverage admiring his willingness to fight and others noting the near-certainty of the outcome.

September 5, 2025 — Final Judgment: $2 Million and Lifetime Ban

The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington signed a joint stipulation and final judgment on September 5, 2025. The order resolved the case against Daly on the following terms. Daly admitted to violating both copyright law and the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions by selling modchips and tools that bypassed Switch security systems, enabling piracy and unauthorized game backups. He agreed to pay Nintendo $2 million in damages.

The permanent injunction entered against Daly is exceptionally broad. It bans him for life from selling, distributing, marketing, or promoting the MIG Switch, MIG Dumper, or any other circumvention device. It bars him from operating any website related to piracy or circumvention. It prevents him from accessing any device that has been hacked or tampered with to circumvent Nintendo’s protective measures. It prohibits him from reverse engineering Nintendo systems or linking to materials related to doing so. Modded Hardware’s website was shut down and all associated domains, including the moddedhardware.com site itself, were surrendered to Nintendo. Nintendo took possession of all physical inventory and assets related to the business.

What Daly Sold and How the Products Worked

Modded Hardware was a US-based online storefront selling a range of circumvention products. The core offerings were the MIG Switch flashcart and the MIG Dumper. The flashcart allowed users to load ROM files onto a microSD card and play them through the Switch’s game card slot as though they were legitimate cartridges. The Dumper allowed users to rip ROM dumps from physical game cartridges. Together, the products formed a complete piracy pipeline: dump your games (or download ROMs someone else had dumped), load them onto the flashcart, and play without a cartridge.

Beyond the standalone devices, Nintendo’s complaint alleged that Modded Hardware also sold Nintendo Switch consoles that had been pre-modified with custom firmware and pre-loaded with pirated games. Customers could order a device ready to play without any additional steps. This move from selling circumvention tools to selling ready-to-pirate consoles directly demonstrated that the operation went beyond enabling backups into active facilitation of large-scale game piracy.

Nintendo’s Broader Anti-Piracy Campaign

The Daly judgment did not exist in isolation. It was one node in Nintendo’s most aggressive enforcement period in its history, spanning emulators, ROM sites, modding hardware, and pirate streaming.

In March 2024, Nintendo settled with Tropic Haze LLC, the developers of the Yuzu Nintendo Switch emulator. The settlement required Tropic Haze to pay Nintendo $2.4 million and immediately cease all development and distribution of Yuzu and its companion 3DS emulator Citra. Nintendo had alleged that Yuzu facilitated piracy by enabling Switch games to be played without a console, citing 1 million pre-release downloads of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom as evidence of the scale of the problem. The Yuzu settlement arrived in days, settling before the case reached any significant litigation phase.

In July 2025, the FBI seized the domain of nsw2u, a major Nintendo Switch ROM distribution site, as part of a law enforcement operation. Nintendo also took possession of the Ryujinx Switch emulator website in late 2024, though the Ryujinx situation differed from Yuzu: the creator was not sued but was instead reportedly paid by Nintendo to cease development and surrender the domain, reflecting Nintendo’s assessment that Ryujinx had avoided the specific technical infringement that made Yuzu legally vulnerable.

Nintendo separately filed suit against a streamer for broadcasting pirated Switch games ahead of their official release dates, seeking an injunction and $17,500 in damages. The concurrent lawsuit against James Williams over his ROM distribution shops targeted an individual operating multiple pirate storefronts across different online identities.

The DMCA Anti-Circumvention Framework

Every Nintendo piracy case rests on the same legal foundation: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention provisions, codified at 17 U.S.C. § 1201. The DMCA makes it unlawful to circumvent a technological protection measure that controls access to a copyrighted work and to traffic in tools or services designed to circumvent such measures. Nintendo builds authentication systems into both its consoles and its game cartridges. The Switch checks that game cartridges contain valid authentication data before allowing them to run. Flashcarts like the MIG Switch, and the software that makes them work, are designed specifically to defeat that check.

Nintendo’s legal theory in the Daly case did not require proving that any specific act of piracy occurred. The act of selling the circumvention device itself was the violation. The DMCA’s trafficking prohibition was enacted specifically to prevent the commercial distribution of tools whose primary purpose is to enable copyright infringement at scale. Nintendo’s complaint documented that Daly’s products had no commercially significant use other than circumvention, making the trafficking liability relatively straightforward to establish.

What This Lawsuit Teaches Consumers

The Modded Hardware judgment illustrates two things that apply far beyond this specific case. The first is the asymmetry of DMCA litigation between individuals and institutional IP holders. Daly was not a major operation by any measure, but Nintendo sued him as though he were, because the DMCA allows for statutory damages that vastly exceed actual documented harm. The $2 million figure is not a calculation of games Nintendo failed to sell because of Daly’s store. It is a deterrent, calculated to make the risk of operating such a business prohibitive even for someone who genuinely believed they were providing a legitimate backup service.

The second lesson is procedural. Representing yourself against a company with Nintendo’s legal infrastructure is not a viable strategy. Daly filed 17 affirmative defenses and denied everything. Nintendo had pre-existing case law, FBI cooperation, statutory damage frameworks, and decades of enforcement experience behind it. The gap between those positions was never going to close. His decision to proceed pro se prolonged the case but did not change its outcome. It added a layer of public drama to what was, from a legal standpoint, a case Nintendo was going to win from the day it was filed.

For consumers who own MIG Switch devices: possessing one is not itself the legal violation that this lawsuit addressed. Selling them commercially, distributing them at scale, or pre-loading pirated games onto consoles for resale is where the DMCA liability attaches. Nintendo’s enforcement focus has consistently targeted commercial distributors and infrastructure operators, not individual hobbyists. But Nintendo’s updated user agreements, which explicitly reserve the right to restrict online access to consoles running circumvention software, have created separate risks for individual users who connect modified hardware to Nintendo’s servers. The line between hobbyist backup and actionable infringement is narrower than it used to be, and Nintendo has demonstrated it will invest in enforcement to maintain it. For more on Nintendo’s IP enforcement posture, see our coverage of the Nintendo vs. Pocketpair Palworld patent lawsuit.