Japanese man receives suspended 2-year prison sentence for selling modified Switch consoles

A Japanese man apprehended in January for modifying and selling Nintendo Switch consoles was found guilty by a Kochi District Court on April 14. He has been given three years probation on a two-year prison sentence and a fine of 500,000 yen (around $3,500 USD), making him the first person in Japan to be arrested and punished for modding and selling a Nintendo Switch.

The convicted man, identified as 58-year-old transportation businessman Fumihiro Otobe, was implicated in violating Nintendo’s trademark rights for soldering modchips to secondhand Switch motherboards and peddling them online for roughly $195 USD. The modified consoles are reported to have been bundled with 27 pirated games, but it’s unclear how many devices Otobe sold before being caught.

Why Otobe was charged under the Trademark Act rather than the Unfair Competition Prevention Act, a law passed in 2019 that, in part, targets the modifying and hacking of video game consoles, was not explained. Usada Pekora, one of the biggest Vtubers in the world, was recently forced to delist a stream archive under suspicions of playing a hacked Pokémon Emerald cartridge because of the potential of running afoul of the Unfair Competition Prevention Act.

Otobe’s case also brings to mind Gary Bowser, a 53-year-old Canadian national who was arrested in the Dominican Republic in October 2020 for developing and selling jailbreaking devices for video game consoles, most notably the Nintendo Switch, as part of piracy group Team Xecuter. Bowser’s punishment, however, was especially harsh compared to Otobe’s: he faced three years in prison before being released in 2023 for good behavior and still owes Nintendo millions of dollars, fines that will likely be garnished from his income for the rest of his life.

Nintendo thanked the various United States law enforcement agencies that assisted in Bowser’s arrest at the time of his conviction in a somewhat melodramatic press release that read, “Nintendo appreciates the hard work and tireless efforts of federal prosecutors and law enforcement agencies to curb illegal activities on a global scale that cause serious harm to Nintendo and the video game industry.” A similar victory lap-style statement has yet to be published in response to Otobe’s sentencing.