Over the past few days, we’ve seen a couple news regarding the infamous piracy flashcart for the Nintendo Switch: MIG Switch. MIG Switch V2 reaching reviewers, competitors ramping up but still not hitting retailers, and a lawsuit.
MIG Switch V2 reaches reviewers’ hands
Following the pressure of incoming competition, MIG Switch team have been working on a “V2” version of their flashcart, with the only known innovation being a button to cycle through games easily. Nick Moses and Deadspecimen, who have been covering a lot of the MIG Switch / UnlockSwitch hardware, have a live test of MIG Switch V2 below (actual test starts at about 30 min in the stream):
My take from their tests is that the button was a needed change, unfortunately the actual implementation isn’t as user friendly (button not super easy to press) as you might want. (update: The button also appears to only work on the OLED switch, based on some early tests.)
None of this changes my personal opinion on these devices, which is that hacking your switch (modchips literally cost $10) is probably a better bet in the longer run.
UnlockSwitch taking their sweet time – Preview copies being sent to reviewers
UnlockSwitch, the MIG Switch clone/competitor upcoming device, have been very active on social media, becoming borderline annoying over the past few weeks, by heavily promoting a device that isn’t available yet, and still doesn’t even have a release date. At this point, the vaporware effect of their product has reached 200% as far as I’m concerned. Nonetheless, the team say they are sending beta units to reviewers this week, and hopefully we’ll start seeing a few reviews sometime soon.
I’m saying “new” review copies, because you might remember that review copies of the UnlockSwitch had already been sent to several folks a while ago, but those had turned out to be reconditioned MIG Switch devices. From UnlockSwitch’s perspective, this was possibly a way to say they had the means to clone the MIG Switch (or mass-produce a copy), but from an external point of view, it appeared at the time as if it could have been an elaborate bait and switch (no pun intended).
UnlockSwitch remains heavily in the “wait and see” territory from my perspective, until the product actually starts hitting retailers.
MIG Switch hit with a lawsuit?
On the MIG Switch front, despite V2 flashcarts being in production, things don’t appear to be doing great. A few folks discovered late last week that their official site migswitch.com is now dead, and DNS records appear to show that the url is now owned by some entity located in the US (specifically, WA). Speculation is ongoing that the domain has been seized as part of an ongoing lawsuit by Nintendo against the owners of some console modding shops.
Specifically, Ryan Michael Daly (aka Modded Hardware) and James Williams (aka Archbox) are being sued for their involvements with selling Nintendo modding tools and services. Archhbox in particular is a moderator of the SwitchPirates subreddit, and his activity there is heavily used against him in the case. In particular, the Nintendo lawsuit quotes archbox as intentionally and knowingly breaking the law, from some of his quotes on the subreddit. (For all of my younger readers out there, this is a strong reminder that anonymity is very relative on the internet, don’t say anything online you might regret one day)
As part of the fallout of these lawsuits, the MIG_Switch subreddit has gone private, showing Nintendo’s legal actions are somewhat effective when it comes to the chilling effect on the scene.
So to clarify things, MIG Switch themselves aren’t being sued (possibly because they are not located in the US), but they are heavily mentioned in the lawsuit. Nintendo’s approach here seems to be that even if they can’t target MIG Switch themselves, they will hit at anyone in the US trying to sell or promote the flashcart.
From the lawsuit:
The Mod-Chips and MIG Devices (collectively, the “Circumvention Devices”) and Hacked Consoles are and/or contain technology designed and marketed for the purpose of circumventing Nintendo’s TPMs. Specifically, each of these products is designed to circumvent Nintendo’s TPMs that prevent users from accessing and modifying Nintendo’s firmware and operating system, accessing or copying Nintendo video games, and playing pirated Nintendo video games. Customers who purchase Defendant’s products or services are easily able to play pirated copies of Nintendo video games that they downloaded from the internet. They also are able to copy their own Nintendo video games and re-distribute them, and to otherwise cause Nintendo Switch consoles to operate in ways that they were not designed to operate.
Nintendo’s lawyers are of course not buying the obvious “MIG Switch is a development device” marketing lie.
Following their domain name being seized, MIG Switch have apparently reacted with their own change in domain name, although at this point it is quite difficult to say if this is really MIG Switch behind the new domain name, or some impersonators. The statement on the new site (migswitchru.com) , as of July 1st:
Although the situation is still not clear, it seems our company has lost the ownership of our domain name www.migswitch.com
First and most important: We are operating as usual. We are shipping our products. All orders are being fulfilled and nothing has changed beside the domain name.
We are shocked by what happened for several reasons, and we feel this is not only shocking for us but for the freedom of Internet in general.
First, we were not warned or had a chance to answer and defend our products or at least the simple fact that whatever the complaint is, it applies only to a few countries and in no way allows to take down a domain for all users in the world. Can Afghanistan request to take down a .com website that goes again its interests? We don’t think so.
But more than that, this is a .com domain, meaning a universal domain applying to many countries.
“.com” domains sell products like drug/medications which are only legal in certain countries, or gambling. US sites selling or promoting weapons which are illegal in just about every country on the planet are registered in .com. We never heard any of them being seized as they are operating legally in their markets.
We clearly indicate on our site that our product is for legal use only in countries/jurisdictions where backing up your legally owned games is authorized. And there are many.
We do not even sell our products directly from our website. And there is no copyrighted material to be found anywhere.
If what we suspect is true, this is another proof of the abuse and bullying from some governments and companies which think they are above the laws of the world and do not respect anyone who think different.We will not tolerate that attitude and bow down to those bullies.
Of course, IP blocking our site in countries where our products are considered illegal is totally acceptable. And we would never challenge it. In fact, it is the case for many companies. Some of our distributors even enforce that on their own.
But trying to tell the world what is right or wrong based on your country point of view is really unacceptable and add to the hate of certain countries for their bullies’ attitude.Please note this site is likely only temporary as we know our many users need access to files and support and is a quick fix. We will likely move again to a more secure domain in the weeks to come.
Thank you for your understanding and for your support against the bullies of the world. As soon as we find out more about what happened, we will post about it so all of us can report to pro-freedom NGO and hopefully contribute to making Internet a better place.
P.S.: If you are not able to access this website, we will post news and update on our .onion website accessible by TOR:4gnoefk5zilujdkixixlsiagd3al5cejg3ooiwq2uuxgizgpnpwq7cqd.onion
I really want to say that MIG Switch are some petty criminals who “got it coming” and should get off their high horse, but they do make a few good points in that statement! With that being said, they demonstrate a poor understanding of jurisdiction when it comes to URLs: I’m no lawyer, but I’m pretty sure the .com top level domain falls under US law. So it would make sense that by purchasing a .com url, they are running into this kind of issue. Surely, since they claim to be Russians, the easiest for them to avoid this kind of issue would be to get a .ru website instead… Unless Team Xecuter MIG Switch actually don’t have anyone operating in Russia?
Torrentfreak have copies of the official complaints from the two ongoing lawsuits, here and here.
Conclusion: MIG Switch world is still a mess!
As always, if you’re a potential customer of these products, tread carefully. MIG Switch and its clones in particular have seen a disproportionate amount of issues (orders taking months to be delivered in the “good” scenarios, or never shipped in the worst cases). And again, I do have a summary of ways to hack your Nintendo Switch here.