In November last year, Nintendo filed a complaint against Jesse Keighin, known by the alias Every Game Guru, accusing him of using emulators and streaming pirated games, some of which were leaks of unreleased Nintendo games. However, as Keighin did not show up to court, on April 18, 2025 Nintendo sought default judgement from the court, which refers to a ruling granted in favor of the plaintiff (in this case Nintendo) due to the defendant’s failure to respond to summons.
In their complaint, Nintendo laid out their evidence against Keighin, compiling all of his alleged offenses. Nintendo accuses Keighin of using emulators that circumvent Nintendo Switch’s technological measures which prevent play of illegal game copies, and, by extension, hacking the console. Furthermore, Nintendo lists that Keighin was sharing links for emulators on his social media accounts and distributing piracy tools to the public. They also noted that unauthorized streams of illegally obtained (and) unreleased games compromise Nintendo’s prerelease marketing, which is an offense Keighin allegedly committed over 50 times, infringing copyright of 10 different Nintendo titles in the process.
In spite of this, Nintendo demands a compensation of $17,500 in total, which accounts for damages related to one title, rather than all ten, which could have potentially amounted to up to $1.5 million (according to TorrentFreak). Nintendo also requested for Keighin to be banned from further using his platforms to promote any actions that could pose a threat to Nintendo’s intellectual property – that also includes the usage of emulators and piracy.
Nintendo has always had a harsh attitude towards piracy and copyright infringement, and by going as far as taking a streamer to court they may be trying to set a clear example to discourage others from doing similar things. As Game*Spark notes, a case like this could also potentially call into question the legality of livestreams which feature games on Nintendo’s consoles that are not supported for screen-sharing, as opposed to Switch. To give an example – in order to livestream a 3DS game, you’ll first need to mod the system, and whether this could be considered a violation of Nintendo’s guidelines or not is up for debate.
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