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Don't want your Switch 2 bricked? Move to Europe [1]
['Grant St. Clair']
Date: 2025-07-23
Aside from the price, one of the major points of contention surrounding the Nintendo Switch 2 has been its potential to be remotely bricked, or rendered useless. Nintendo's EULAs have always been fairly stringent, to put it mildly, which is undoubtedly one of the reasons their consoles have proven so popular among jailbreakers. You'll have to pry my homebrewed 3DS out of my cold, dead hands.
Perhaps in an attempt to curb that behavior, however, the Switch 2's license agreement doubles down, allowing Nintendo to terminate your console's function at any time for any reason. This is ostensibly to combat piracy, but users who have dumped their own legitimate games, as well as unsuspecting secondhand buyers purchasing games that have been dumped by someone else, have all been hit with the banhammer. The message seems clear: buy directly from Nintendo forever, or risk getting saddled with the world's most expensive paperweight… unless, of course, you live in Europe. The EU's slightly sturdier consumer protections keep Nintendo from terminating your shiny new console on a whim:
The closest version reads as follows: "Any Digital Products registered to your Nintendo Account and any updates of such Digital Products are licensed only for personal and non-commercial use on a User Device. Digital Products must not be used for any other purpose. In particular, without NOE's written consent, you must neither lease nor rent Digital Products nor sublicense, publish, copy, modify, adapt, translate, reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble any portion of Digital Products other than as expressly permitted by applicable law. Such unauthorized use of a Digital Product may result in the Digital Product becoming unusable." In Europe, Nintendo can only block access to pirated Switch 2 games if it detects unauthorized access to certain titles. Under no circumstances could they block or brick the console, a term in video game slang that means the system is unusable. This significant legal difference does not mean that Nintendo cares less about piracy in Europe. Rather, it means that the legal framework in Europe is much more protective of users. The corresponding laws understand that disabling a device for unauthorized access to software is an excessive and illegal measure.
If only the US could take a break from its backslide into fascism to catch up. Should you move to Europe just to hack your Switch 2? Well, probably not, but it's certainly one more reason to add to the list.
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[1] Url:
https://boingboing.net/2025/07/23/dont-want-your-switch-2-bricked-move-to-europe.html
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