Nintendo sues player who kept streaming pirated Switch games, taunted ‘I can do this all day’

Nintendo is suing a player who it says repeatedly streamed pirated Switch games, while taunting the company that he couldn’t be caught.

Nintendo has filed a lawsuit against Jesse Keighin, who it says streams games on various online platforms under his username Every Game Guru.

According to the company, Keighin “is a recidivist pirate who has obtained and streamed Nintendo’s leaked games on multiple occasions”.

The lawsuit alleges that since 2022, Keighin has streamed “at least 10 of Nintendo’s leaked games” before they were released, “more than 50 times in total”, the most recent being Mario & Luigi: Brothership.

Although Nintendo says it has “submitted dozens of takedown notices”, and platforms such as YouTube and Twitch have shut his channels down, it says Keighin “continues to unlawfully stream Nintendo’s copyrighted works and thumb his nose at Nintendo and the law”.

It also claims that Keighin taunted Nintendo, sending the company “a letter boasting that he has ‘a thousand burner channels’ to stream from and ‘can do this all day’”.

Keighin is also accused of “continuing to seek to profit off his unauthorised streaming of Nintendo’s games” by adding CashApp details to his streams after his channels were demonitised.

On top of all the above, Keighin is also accused of regularly posting links to ROM repositories, emulators and the illegally obtained prod.keys which are needed to make them run.

“By not only streaming leaked games, but also directly providing users links to circumvention software, Nintendo’s proprietary cryptographic keys, and pirated ROM repositories, Defendant is giving his viewers everything they need to pirate as many games as they wish,” Nintendo claims.

“Indeed, Defendant recently boasted online that he wants to ‘help anyone and everyone who wants to get Nintendo games for free (and early), or who needs help installing and setting up Switch emulators that let you play Switch games for free’.”

Listing 10 games it believes Keighin has streamed in a pre-release pirated form on an emulator, Nintendo is seeking $150,000 damages “with respect to each copyrighted work”. Given that it claims he has streamed these games “more than 50 times in total”, it’s not currently clear whether it means $150,000 per game ($1.5 million) or per stream ($7.5 million).

It also seeks $2,500 for each “act of circumvention” Keighin made (which it says he did each time he “loaded unauthorised copies of games into Ryujinx, Yuzu, or another emulator and streamed them”), as well as $2,500 for each time he offered to help the public to play emulated games by providing links to emulators, ROMs and crypto keys.