A US District Court has ordered James “Archbox” Williams, the former lead moderator of r/SwitchPirates, to pay Nintendo $4.5m (about £3.4m) after he failed to answer the company’s Switch piracy lawsuit. The case, filed in Washington in June 2024, accused Williams of running a network of “Pirate Shops” that sold access to libraries of pirated Nintendo Switch games, and of using his position on Reddit to promote them.
How the Switch piracy lawsuit unfolded
Because Williams never filed a response, the court was required to treat every allegation in Nintendo’s complaint as true. That is a standard feature of a default judgment in US federal civil cases: rather than testing the claims against a defence, the judge accepts the plaintiff’s account once the defendant has had a fair chance to answer and has not. US District Judge Lauren King granted Nintendo’s motion for default judgment in full on 23 September. Williams did hire an attorney at one point during the proceedings, but only to contest a Google subpoena connected to the case, not to defend himself against Nintendo’s claims, according to TechPowerUp.
What the injunction bans
Alongside the damages figure, the court issued a permanent injunction against Williams personally. It bars him from:
- Operating any pirate shop offering access to Nintendo software
- Distributing or sharing pirated Nintendo Switch games
- Distributing or promoting software designed to circumvent Nintendo’s console protections
That third restriction targets circumvention tools specifically, the category Nintendo’s legal team tends to pursue hardest, separately from ordinary game piracy, because it enables piracy at scale rather than one download at a time.
What the pirate shops sold and how they were funded
Nintendo’s complaint described Williams promoting the Pirate Shops through r/SwitchPirates, the subreddit where he served as lead moderator, and using that position to solicit eShop gift card donations from members to help fund the acquisition of further pirated titles. The subreddit supplied both an audience and a recruitment channel: members were steered toward the shops as a matter of course, with the piracy operation and the moderation team effectively the same people wearing two different names.
Where this sits alongside our earlier Nintendo coverage
We last covered Nintendo on 13 September, when the Zelda 40th anniversary Switch 2 console came back in stock at $519.99. That story was about legitimate demand outstripping supply for hardware Nintendo sells directly. This one is about the other side of the same ledger: a US court now pricing what happens when someone builds an audience and a funding stream around skipping that purchase entirely. Nothing about the hardware situation has changed in the two weeks since, but the contrast is the point: Nintendo puts as much effort into keeping consoles in stock as it does into shutting down the networks built to avoid buying them.
What to watch
A default judgment is a ruling on liability, not a guarantee of payment. Nintendo now has a $4.5m judgment and a permanent injunction against an individual defendant; whether it collects any meaningful share of that figure, or simply uses the ruling as a deterrent against other moderators running similar shops, is the part the court record does not settle.
