Nintendo wins suit against defiant pirater

Nintendo’s hard-line approach to piracy has shut down a streamer who seemingly specialized in unauthorized content.

Jesse Keighin has been ordered to pay Nintendo $17,500 in damages after livestreaming gameplay footage of at least 10 different games on at least 50 occasions before the games were released to the public. Included among those were Super Mario Party Jamboree, Mario & Luigi: Brothership, The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, and Pikmin 4.

Keighin was served with takedown notices by Nintendo dozens of times for those streams. Yet he continued to air himself playing the games, encouraging viewers to support him on loco.gg, an Indian live-streaming and esports platform, if his other accounts were banned. 

Platforms would take the account down following Nintendo’s complaints. But after that happened, Keighin sent emails to Nintendo saying “I have a thousand burner channels” and “[w]e can do this all day,” according to the recommendation of the U.S. magistrate judge who oversaw the case. 

Nintendo also says Keighin had released links to repositories of ROMs (digital pirated games), including several that were Switch-specific. Those pirated copies are played via emulators, such as Yuzu.

Yuzu was a target of Nintendo’s anti-piracy campaign last year. The video game company shut down the emulator, saying the team behind it had enabled “piracy at a colossal scale.” The Yuzu team agreed to pay $2.4 million and ended all operations.

But in an email to Nintendo, Keighin vowed to “actively help people find newer and updated copies” of the software, which he said was “still being developed underground,” according to the judge’s recommendation.

That cavalier attitude also led Keighin to ignore Nintendo’s repeated attempts to serve him with the lawsuit. His refusal to engage resulted in the case proceeding without him, which led to the default judgment.

Nintendo has long taken an aggressive stance against piracy of its games, including emulator programs.

Dolphin, an open-source emulator for the Nintendo Wii and GameCube, was a target of the gaming giant in 2023 when Dolphin’s developers announced plans to put its emulator on the Steam game distribution platform. Nintendo sent a cease-and-desist order to Valve, which pulled the listing. Days later, Dolphin’s developers announced: “It is with much disappointment that we have to announce that the Dolphin on Steam release has been indefinitely postponed.”

A $17,500 judgment isn’t pocket change, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the $4.5 million Nintendo is seeking against a now-former moderator on Reddit, after accusing him of facilitating a network of online websites that offered pirated Nintendo Switch games.

Nintendo says in the filing that it could easily have demanded more, alleging that the defendant, James C. Williams, “not only copied and distributed Nintendo game files without authorization; he actively promoted their distribution and copying to thousands of others across a variety of websites and online ‘communities,’ and knowingly trafficked in unlawful software products aimed at circumventing Nintendo’s technological measures protecting against unauthorized access.”

While the Switch remains important to Nintendo, the Switch 2 is driving more and more of the company’s revenue. On November 1, the company reported its fiscal Q2 earnings, noting it had sold 10.36 million Switch 2 units between June 5 and September 30 and was raising its sales estimate for the year. That’s twice the rate the Switch sold in the same time period.

Nintendo now expects to sell 19 million Switch 2s before the end of March 2026. The original Switch has thus far sold 154.01 million units.