Nintendo Switch: Buying second-hand games has become too dangerous, we explain why

For gamers with limited budget The second-hand video games market has long been a haven for building your collection at a lower cost. By purchasing used games at a discount, players can discover games they’ve missed or relive classics without paying full price.

However, this app is now under serious threat to Nintendo Switch owners due to the emergence of new game hacking tools. These devices made it possible to create perfect digital clones of any Switch game cartridge with unprecedented ease. hence the legitimacy and safety of purchasing used games is questioned.

Cloning Switch games became child’s play

At the heart of this problem are two secret but powerful products: Mig Switch rewritable game cartridge and Mig Switch Damper. Mig Switch is an unauthorized circuit board that can be inserted into any blank Switch game cartridge. This turns the read-only cartridge into a cartridge that can play pirated games loaded onto the cartridge from a computer.

Most importantly, the Mig Switch Damper is a simple USB device. To extract all data from an original Switch game cartridge. By connecting Dumper to a computer on which a legal game is installed, the user gains access to all the files needed to create the same clone: ​​the game’s full ROM data, unique encryption keys, identity certificates, and much more. This means that any Switch game you buy, new or used, can essentially become a “master copy.” Create unlimited numbers of perfect hacked copies on rewritable Mig Switch cartridges.

Mig Switch Damper will change the second-hand market

The consequences for the second-hand game market are huge and worrying. While purchasing a previously used cartridge guarantees that you will receive the original product manufactured by Nintendo, these hacking tools have opened a Pandora’s box of potential fakes. Buyers of used games no longer have a reliable way to verify that the cartridge they are purchasing has not already been subject to data cloning and illegitimate redistribution. Even a solid, resealed cartridge can hide a pirated clone of a game.

“ If people have the ability to produce nearly identical clones of official games then the entire second hand market becomes extremely suspect warns YouTuber Taki Udon, who has been able to test and review these game hacking devices. Unless you literally open every game cartridge used, there is no way to identify fakes made with these new tools. “.

The essence of the risk lies in the fact that it has become easy and cheap to create highly misleading pirated copies. With a small circuit board containing $7 components such as a microcontroller and a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) chip, counterfeiters can produce copies of physical cartridges containing all the certificates your Switch needs to work. Let it be an original game.

Important games such as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild or the brand new Tears of the Kingdom can be sold on the second-hand market for between 30 and 60 euros. At these prices, it becomes extremely profitable to pirate fake copies using these simple chips, which should encourage unscrupulous sellers to deceive buyers. Without the ability for consumers to examine the actual data of each cartridge used, it is impossible to identify a counterfeit product.

Nintendo may ban your account if you buy a cloned game

The dangers are not limited to the money wasted on purchasing the game. Since each genuine game cartridge has a personalized cryptographic signature, if this signature is copied and used online, Nintendo can detect duplication and ban these pirated copies. Therefore, an unsuspecting second-hand game buyer may find themselves unable to play their “legitimate” second-hand purchases online, as Nintendo has already banned accounts for this reason in the past. If the same game is used on several different consoles at the same time, you can guess that the Japanese company will consider this as a problem.

Some people in online Switch hacking communities are already suggesting strategies to take advantage of this new form of hacking:Purchasing brand new games for the sole purpose of quickly copying their data and then returning the cartridges to the store.

In reality, The only way to be sure you’re getting 100% legitimate cartridges is to avoid buying used games altogether. Choosing to buy new games only directly from authorized retailers or through Nintendo’s online store may be the only sure way to avoid potential pitfalls.