he FBI, with support from the FIOD, just seized “several online criminal marketplaces providing pirated versions of popular video games.”
Piracy of any kind is illegal by definition, but there are various degrees to which the consequences of piracy are enforced. Nintendo has a no-nonsense approach to the matter, and now a Switch piracy website has been taken down with great vigor. An official statement from the Federal Bureau of Investigation has confirmed that the Switch Nsw2u ROM site has been seized by its Atlanta Field Office.
The site was infamous for hosting a wide assortment of Switch ROMs, giving users with hacked consoles or emulators on PC access to a wide range of games without the obligation to buy them. Now that the Nsw2u ROM site has been seized, the website is entirely out of service, with the URL confirming the seizure as well, all of it in accordance with a warrant issued by the United States District Court in Georgia.
Image: Pexels
Nsw2uSwitch Piracy Website Seized: Nintendo Nods Its Head in Approval
On July 10, 2025, the FBI released a notice stating that its Atlanta Field Office had come down hard on multiple online criminal marketplaces for “providing pirated versions of popular video games.” Not only did the FBI take down these Switch piracy sites, but it also claimed that it dismantled the infrastructure of these websites, eliminating gamer hopes that it would re-emerge under a new domain. The FBI also collaborated with the Dutch FIOD (Fiscal Information and Investigation Service) to execute this crackdown and thanked the department for its assistance in its announcement.
While we first believed that only the Nsw2u ROM site had been seized following early reports from Kotaku, it was far from the only piracy platform that was affected. A total of seven websites were taken down: Nsw2u, nswdl.com, game-2u.com, bigngame.com, ps4pkg.com, ps4pkg.net, and mgnetu.com. If you haven’t heard of these platforms before, it’s far too late to make the most of what they have to offer.
These platforms had a catalog of a wide range of Nintendo, PC, and PS4 games on hand, but they have all been taken down. The FBI’s seizure announcement also made the scale of its crackdown clear, claiming that between February 28, 2025, and May 28, 2025, over 3.2 million downloads were completed accessing these sites, with the piracy resulting in an estimated loss of $170 million.
Today, we’re announcing the seizure and dismantlement of several illicit video game marketplaces. From February to May of this year, there were approximately 3.2 million illicit downloads, and these downloads caused an estimated loss of $170 million: https://t.co/hrTmF0jIVU pic.twitter.com/saavl4WDEH
— FBI (@FBI) July 11, 2025
Nintendo Takes Piracy Very Seriously—Consider This a Warning
With the Switch piracy website seized, one might presume that the threat to Nintendo’s marketplace has been put to rest, but this is not the case. There are likely many other piracy websites out there that perform the same function and many creative users who are just as capable of sharing their own hacked and reworked programs to bypass the restrictions put in place by Nintendo. The company makes its stance on the matter clear on its website:
If you see games offered for download using Peer-to-Peer networks, or by clicking on links to files hosted on third-party platforms, the content that you are accessing is an unauthorised copy (i.e. a pirate copy). Pirate copies of game files are often referred to as “ROMs”. The uploading and downloading of pirate copies of Nintendo games is illegal.
Nintendo has been very committed to taking down any form of piracy over the years. The company previously sued ROMUniverse, another similar piracy platform that opened up access to Nintendo games in exchange for a fee. Even Switch emulator Yuzu and Ryujinx eventually lost their spot in the market after Nintendo directed their legally-charged ire at them and forced them. Both emulators are now gone.
Nintendo Is Not Thrilled With Unauthorized Third-Party Support Either
Nintendo Switch 2 users who attempted to use the MIG Switch/MIG Flash reprogrammable cartridges on their consoles have now found their devices banned from accessing the company’s online services. While they can still use their consoles, they are effectively disallowed from doing much else.
Nintendo also went to great lengths to include this as a clause in their Nintendo Switch User Agreement, clarifying that it reserved the right to brick the switch if it observed any illegal emulators or pirated games on its device. If you were hoping to rely on these reprogrammable cartridges, even for game dumps of your own cartridges, it’s best to avoid the practice if you don’t want to be locked out of Nintendo’s online services.
My Switch 2 test has been banned, after using the mig switch with perfectly legal dumps of my own cartridges, so it would seem that Nintendo can detect something
Similar reports on reddit are starting to come in.https://t.co/nbPMlRWSaPhttps://t.co/3eq6dkbFMi
I strongly… pic.twitter.com/btzjQYJzE4— SwitchTools (@SwitchTools) June 16, 2025
Fans have been understandably annoyed by the FBI’s decision to take down the Switch piracy website over its other, more significant duties. The chatter online has been largely unimpressed by the move, however, it is impossible to deny that piracy is, in fact, still illegal. There has been much conversation around the “if owning isn’t buying, then piracy isn’t stealing” agenda that has been floating around online, and while the Nsw2u Switch piracy platform may be gone, it is unlikely that piracy of games is a problem that’s going away anytime soon.
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