Nintendo Wins Lawsuit Against Trolling Emulation Streamer

Nintendo has pursued a strong fight against video game emulation and piracy in recent years, and they accrued a solid victory. In 2024, the company sued streamer EveryGameGuru (Jesse Keighin) for 17,500.00 in damages from a Colorado federal court. Since 2022, the streamer had played 10 leaked Nintendo Switch video games, with Mario & Luigi: Brothership being the most recent game based on the suit, as the reporting from Video Games Chronicle indicates.

Keighin boasted and bragged very openly about his activities, even sending emails to Nintendo in response to their takedown requests, stating he has a thousand burner channels and "...can do this all day". According to the court records, he openly taunted the developer/publisher in a Facebook post: “Should have done more research on me. You might run a corporation, I run the streets.” While defiant, Keighin failed to defend his case, TorrentFreak reports.

Nintendo's choice to combat video game preservation through piracy has not been a popular decision among video game fans, namely with their aggressive approach at shutting down ROM sites and going after Super Smash Bros Melee tournaments that utilize a hacked version of the game with the Dolphin emulator. In this instance, intellectual property protection puts Nintendo in the right, as it's premium first party software users are illegally accessing, as opposed to a ROM of the obscure arcade light gun game CarnEvil. Users are certainly making themselves targets, and these are the examples Nintendo is hoping to make a case of for future users. Will it work? Doubtful.

SOURCES: Video Games Chronicle, TorrentFreak