Yeah I read this article on another post, I’m not sure that’s the whole story.
From what I remember, he was running a few “shops”. These don’t actually sell games, but they can be accessed by a piece of homebrew software on the switch, and then you connect to the “shop” to download games directly to the device - this was done instead of manually copying install files to the SD card, installing, and then deleting the original files to save space; or instead of installing over USB. The shops were much easier, not least because removing the SD card to copy games from a PC required a reboot, and rebooting an OG hacked Switch could be kind of a pain.
I think the “sales” he did were actually just donations that got you early access to titles that weren’t widely available yet. However, it’s generally when you start taking money for these things that the shit hits the fan and the hammer comes down.
Basically yeah, don’t take money at all when doing anything like this. And if you do, dont tie your credit card to your online pirating name lol
I hope the scene learns from this. Use a VPN, have a completely different identity. Use a different browser, use a different handle, and don’t use any persobal info. If you are taking donations, use crypto.
I quit using shops years ago because they all ended up being paywalled. It’s been shown time and time again that ‘unrelated donations’ is not a loop hole. Most shops weren’t even unrelated. You had to donate an undumped game or eshop credit towards one. I understand obtaining the games in the first place isn’t free, but taking money for anything Nintendo related is a bad move, and will be seen as selling their copyrighted material in a court of law
I’m also not ashamed to say, I pirate to get free shit. You start charging, I’ll put in more effort to get it for free. There are ways to run your own shop, which I did for a while, but I got tired of messing with the network and just used USB install over DBI for the most part
I still have one that isn’t paywalled (gratis) but I don’t think it’s had any new games in a while. I hardly ever play on it though and haven’t kept up much.
