Nintendo Will Brick Your Switch 2 If You Play Backed-Up Games
As it turns out, most companies aren't cool with piracy. That's pretty understandable: The company exists to make money from its products, and if you use their products without paying for them, that's a rather unsustainable business model. How a company chooses to push back against piracy, however, varies wildly.
Nintendo, for their part, is quite hawkish when it comes to piracy. The company will ban your console from online play if it detects you playing an unauthorized (pirated) game. And last month, the company updated its terms of service for Nintendo Account Services, just in time for the Switch 2 launch. Essentially, the company says that if you do anything to modify your console or software in any way to bypass Nintendo's policies and restrictions, Nintendo will not only ban you from online play, but reserves the right to render your console unusable.
That's pretty intense, and is the first time the company has threatened to brick consoles that are modified or run pirated software. But that's no sweat for you, so long as you don't steal games, right? Well, if you happen to back those games up in a way that Nintendo doesn't approve of, and run those copies on your Switch, that'll count as a brickable offense. In fact, Nintendo has already taken action with some Switch 2 owners.
Don't use an MIG flash cart with your Switch 2
As reported by Android Authority, Nintendo has started bricking Switch 2 consoles that use MIG flash carts for any reason. For the uninitiated, MIG flash carts are like blank Switch cartridges that allow you to load games from a built-in SD cart slot. That means you can use these carts to play pirated games directly on your Switch as if it were a real game, but you can also use it to back up your purchased games.
While piracy is alive and well across tech, the latter is actually something people use these carts for, and it seems to have worked out fine for the original Switch. The idea is, Switch 1 games each have a unique ID—if you pirate a game, that means more than one of these IDs is active, so Nintendo knows someone stole the game. However, if you backup your legitimate game to a MIG cart, the ID is the same, and since only one ID is active, Nintendo lets it pass—at least, that's how things seemed to work with the original Switch.
But that's not the case with the Switch 2. Take a look at this user's post on the subreddit Switch2hacks. They claim their MIG flash cart contained only backups of their purchased games, but after taking their Switch 2 online with the cart present, Nintendo bricked the console. You can see their now-defunct Switch 2, a console that isn't even two weeks old yet, in the photo below:
Other users in that Reddit thread shared the same experience—using an MIG flash cart got their Switch 2 banned. Curiously, it seems Nintendo isn't banning the accounts, only the consoles. One user said their Switch OLED can still run online services, which means Nintendo really is targeting the Switch 2 consoles themselves, rather then both the console and the account it's attached to. I suppose the company is happy to let you buy another $450 console and try again to play by the rules.
Nintendo has moved pretty quickly against this practice, even when you consider how new the Switch 2 is. It was only last week that the company behind MIG flash cart got the tech working on the console, as the carts previously appeared to not function at all. My advice? Stay away from these. It's tempting to to reduce your risk of losing your expensive Switch games, but getting your Switch 2 banned just isn't worth it.
Can you back up your Switch 2 games without getting banned?
You can't back up the games themselves, but you can back up your save data—as long as you pay for Nintendo Switch Online. Assuming you do, you can highlight the game in question on your console's home screen, press the - or + button on your controller, choose "Save Data Cloud," choose the relevant user, then choose "Back Up Save Data."