And what about this is novel over how Xbox and PlayStation handle things?
Xbox has been permanently banning consoles from online, like Nintendo, for a decade and a half. Anyone remember the 2009 mega ban wave? One million Xboxes permanently banned simultaneously and Nintendo is somehow uniquely evil with the Switch 2 and we’ve never seen anything like this. Malarkey.
Although, that being said, Nintendo has been doing console bans since the 3DS. Every 3DS cart has a serial number and the server will ban consoles that happen to both be online with the same cart at the same time. Switch and Switch 2 have the same restriction. It was really only the Wii and DSi that were lax.
I suspect what really changed is that the MiG Switch exists. People just now got access to a cheap, reasonable, and most importantly, difficult to ban flashcart solution. What's going on is that people are dumping their games, selling them on, but still playing their now-illegal backups. Since those games have been dumped and are on the used market they're little time bombs that will explode and kill someone's console.
Even in the 3DS era, though, much of the piracy scene was focused on CFW and homebrew piracy apps. The thing about CFW developers is that they actually have the fear of God (or at least the feds) in their heart, so they ONLY provide enough instruction to get homebrew working. And the people providing piracy tools on top of that are part of the piracy scene, they know what gets banned, so they're all going to tell you a hundred times to NEVER. USE. PUBLIC. HEADERS. ONLINE.
But the MiG Switch people? They don't care. They just want to sell you a flashcart. Hell, Gateway (the 3DS equivalent) was run by people who shipped literal console-bricking malware to try and "protect" their flashcard against clones (ironically). The only reason this didn't become an issue on 3DS is that Gateway's precious exploit got patched and they couldn't steal exploits and tools from the CFW scene fast enough to keep the card working.
> The thing about CFW developers is that they actually have the fear of God (or at least the feds) in their heart, so they ONLY provide enough instruction to get homebrew working.
More, they're usually not interested in piracy, they're more interested in making some sprites slew around a screen to a chiptune.
Xbox has been permanently banning consoles from online, like Nintendo, for a decade and a half. Anyone remember the 2009 mega ban wave? One million Xboxes permanently banned simultaneously and Nintendo is somehow uniquely evil with the Switch 2 and we’ve never seen anything like this. Malarkey.