Buying used games on Nintendo Switch is no longer really a good idea, since this practice could lead to your account being banned if you don’t pay attention to the origin of the cartridge.
For gamers on a limited budget, the second-hand market for video games has long been a refuge for building your collection at a lower cost. By purchasing used games at a discount, gamers could discover titles they had missed or relive classics without paying full price.
However, this practice is now under serious threat for Nintendo Switch owners due to the emergence of new game hacking tools. These devices made it possible to create perfect digital clones of any Switch game cartridge with unprecedented ease, thus calling into question the legitimacy and safety of purchasing used games.
Cloning Switch games has become child’s play
At the heart of this problem are two discreet, but powerful products: the Mig Switch rewritable game cartridge and the Mig Switch Dumper. The Mig Switch is an unauthorized circuit board that can be inserted into any empty Switch game cartridge. This turns the read-only cartridge into one capable of playing pirated games loaded onto the cartridge from a computer.
Most importantly, the Mig Switch Dumper is a simple USB device capable to extract all data from a genuine Switch game cartridge. By connecting the Dumper to a computer with a legitimate game installed, the user gains access to all the files needed to create an identical clone: the game’s full ROM data, unique encryption keys, identification certificates, and many other things too. This means that any Switch game purchase, new or used, can essentially become a “master copy” allowing you to generate unlimited number of perfect hacked duplicates on rewritable Mig Switch cartridges.
The Mig Switch Dumper will change the second-hand market
The implications for the used games market are immense and alarming. Whereas previously, purchasing a used cartridge guaranteed you were getting the genuine item produced by Nintendo, these hacking tools have opened up a Pandora’s box of potential counterfeits. There is now no reliable way for a buyer of used games to verify that the cartridge they are purchasing has not already been the subject of data cloning and illegitimate redistribution. Even an intact, resealed cartridge can hide a pirated clone of a game.
“ If people have the ability to produce near-identical clones of official games, then the whole second-hand market becomes super shady “, warns Taki Udon, YouTuber, who was able to test and examine these game hacking devices. “ You would have no way of identifying counterfeits made with these new tools unless you literally opened every used game cartridge “.
The heart of the risk comes from the fact that it has become easy and cheap to generate extremely misleading pirate copies. With just a small circuit board including $7 worth of components such as a microcontroller and a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) chip, counterfeiters can produce copies of physical cartridges, which contain all the certificates your Switch needs to make it work. considers this to be an authentic game.
Major titles like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild or the brand new Tears of the Kingdom can sell for between 30 and 60 euros on the second-hand market. At these prices, pirating counterfeit copies using these simple chips becomes extremely lucrative, which should therefore encourage unscrupulous sellers to deceive buyers. Without being able to inspect the actual data on each used cartridge, consumers have no way to identify a counterfeit.
Nintendo could ban your account if you buy a cloned game
The dangers are not limited to the money wasted when purchasing the title. Since each actual game cartridge has an individualized encryption signature, if that signature is duplicated and used online, Nintendo could detect the duplication and ban those pirated copies. Thus, an unsuspecting second-hand game buyer could find themselves unable to play their “legitimate” second-hand purchase online, as Nintendo has already banned accounts for this reason in the past. If the same game is used on several different consoles at the same time, you can imagine that the Japanese company will consider this to be a problem.
Some people in online Switch hacking communities are already suggesting strategies to take advantage of this new form of hacking, includingt buying brand new games for the sole purpose of quickly dumping their data to duplicate them, then returning the cartridges to the store.
Also read – Switch 2: price, release date, new features, everything we already know about the new Nintendo console
How can you reduce the risk of buying a second-hand copy of a game?
Faced with all these new risks, what can buyers do to protect themselves in the used Switch games market? First of all, If the price of a used game seems too good to be true, it probably is. Buyers must examine the cartridges carefully looking for signs of tampering, lower production quality or other potential indicators of counterfeiting. Additionally, asking sellers directly if the data for the game in question has ever been dumped or cloned can reassure them, although there is no real way to verify these confirmations. Worse yet, if you buy a game from someone who previously bought it from someone else, it becomes even more complicated to ensure its legitimacy.
In reality, The only way for you to ensure that you are getting 100% legitimate cartridges is to completely avoid buying used games. Choosing to only purchase new games directly from authorized retailers or Nintendo’s online store might be the only sure way to avoid potential pitfalls.