Nintendo has won a $4.5 million judgment against James C. Williams, an Arizona man known online as "Archbox" who moderated the r/SwitchPirates subreddit. Judge Lauren King of the US District Court for the Western District of Washington granted Nintendo a default judgment this week. The court awarded the maximum statutory damages of $150,000 for each of the 30 Switch games named in the complaint and issued a permanent injunction ordering Williams out of the piracy business for good.
No trial took place and no argument was heard. Williams never answered the lawsuit, so the court decided it on Nintendo's filings alone. The case runs more than two years from start to finish.
What Nintendo said he did
Nintendo filed the suit in June 2024. The company alleged that Williams used his position as a lead moderator of r/SwitchPirates to run, or steer traffic to, several "pirate shops." These were storefronts offering copies of Switch games, and according to the complaint they had been running since around 2019. The subreddit had grown to roughly 190,000 members.
The allegation that probably did the most damage concerns how the library grew. Nintendo said Williams asked the community for "donations" of Nintendo eShop gift cards. He then allegedly used those cards to buy legitimate copies of games, decrypt them and add them to the shops. In other words, Nintendo's own storefront was being used to pay for the pirated copies. The complaint also accused him of helping users install circumvention software on their consoles, the modified firmware and tools that let a Switch run unauthorised copies.
The 30 titles in the suit are Nintendo's own first-party games. They include The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, three of the best-selling games on the platform.
Why it ended in a default
A default judgment is what a court issues when a defendant does not show up. Nintendo asked for one in October 2024, after Williams missed the deadline to respond to the complaint. He clearly knew about the case: at one point Williams hired a lawyer to object to a subpoena Nintendo had served on Google, but he never filed an answer to the complaint itself.
That choice shaped the result. Because Williams never contested the allegations, the court treated Nintendo's factual claims as established. It also accepted Nintendo's position that the infringement was willful, which is what unlocks the top tier of statutory damages. Under US copyright law, a rights holder can ask for a fixed amount per infringed work, from $750 up to $30,000, instead of proving its actual losses. When the infringement is found to be willful, the ceiling rises to $150,000 per work. Nintendo received that ceiling on every one of the 30 games.
What Nintendo left on the table
The award could have been larger. Nintendo's complaint also included claims under the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions, which cover trafficking in tools that break copy protection and carry their own damages. The company dropped its request for money on those claims, and on attorney fees, and asked only for the copyright figure and the injunction. That kept the request simple, which tends to make a default judgment quicker to grant and harder to overturn later.
The injunction is broad. It bars Williams from distributing pirated Nintendo games, from distributing software that circumvents Nintendo's copy protection, and from encouraging anyone else to download pirated games. If he breaks it, he faces contempt of court as well as the unpaid judgment.
A familiar playbook
The case is the latest in a long line. Nintendo won a $2.1 million judgment against the operator of the ROM site RomUniverse in 2021. It secured a $10 million civil judgment against Gary Bowser of the Team Xecuter modchip group in 2022, alongside his criminal sentence. In 2024 it reached a $2.4 million settlement that shut down the Yuzu Switch emulator. Each of those figures was far more than the defendant could likely pay, and that is part of the point. These judgments work as a deterrent, a public record of what the company will pursue and for how long.
Whether Nintendo ever collects the $4.5 million is a separate question, and probably not the main one. The company now has a permanent court order against one of the more visible figures in the Switch piracy scene, and it made clear that it is watching the people who run these communities, not only the people who download from them. With the Switch 2 now the company's main platform and a large Switch 1 library still selling, Nintendo has every reason to keep making examples.
