By Nelson Schneider - 05/18/25 at 01:08 PM CT
Oh, dear. We’ve gotten used to the status quo of Nintendo living in the past and constantly waging a losing war against Games Preservation of ROMs of games from their ancient and obsolete consoles. Meanwhile, Sony has been on the cutting edge of terrible DRM that can prevent even physical games from working without a persistent Internet connection.
This past week, Nintendo took a page from Sony’s playbook (instead of the usual situation where it’s Sony cribbing off Nintendo’s notes) when they updated the Legalese soup of their blanket End User License Agreement with wording that includes the ability to permanently render Nintendo devices unusable in the event that a user does something that provokes the corporation’s ire.
Sadly, Nintendo is well within their rights to do this kind of thing, after the Japanese government revised their policy on modding electronic devices. This is the type of corporate misconduct that spurred me to leave my original Switch permanently disconnected from Nintendo’s network services, even though I haven’t modded it… yet.
While some legal experts insist that EULAs aren’t legally enforceable, with the way the wind is blowing in our global legal and intellectual property ecosystem, it probably isn’t wise to test Nintendo’s willingness to enforce its own rules after you’ve presumably dropped over $500 on a console and game. Of course, there’s always the other option to NOT give Nintendo any money until they learn to respect their customers a little more. After all, the Nintendo logo used to be a symbol of quality, whereas now it has become a symbol of control.
