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To no one's surprise, streamer Jesse "EveryGameGuru" Keighin, who rose to internet fame for streaming and emulating Nintendo Switch games, including unreleased ones, has been sued by Nintendo, a gaming giant whose legal department's strictness is now as renowned as the company's games themselves.
First noticed by 404 Media, the lawsuit describes Keighin as a "recidivist pirate," accusing him of illegally obtaining and streaming Nintendo's leaked games multiple times across various platforms, including Twitch, YouTube, Kick, and others. Since 2022, there have been over fifty alleged instances of unauthorized gameplay from Nintendo games being shared by the defendant, including at least ten cases where the games featured were in their pre-release stages. According to Nintendo, this compromised the company's official marketing campaigns and "[promoted] and [encouraged] downloading of pirated copies of unpublished games."
The gaming giant's preliminary statement also claims that their usual tactic of combating undesirable content through copyright strikes and cease-and-desist letters was ineffective, as Keighin would simply create new accounts to continue his shenanigans. When EveryGameGuru's monetized YouTube account was set to be shut down, the defendant began collecting donations by adding a CashApp link to his streams' descriptions. On top of that, when Nintendo banned his channels a couple of weeks ago, in late October, Keighin reportedly contacted the company himself to boast that he had "a thousand burner channels" and "can do this all day".
As if that wasn't enough, Keighin also promoted the use of Yuzu and Ryujinx Nintendo Switch emulators – both of which were shut down by Nintendo earlier this year – by sharing forks where the software could still be downloaded. In one of his posts, the defendant "rewarded" his audience with a series of links to emulators and pirated Nintendo games, dissing capitalism along the way by describing it as "cancer":
"While all of the Defendant's infringement is harmful, his repeated infringement of prerelease games is especially damaging," wrote Nintendo. "Streaming leaked games prior to their publication normalizes and encourages prerelease piracy – Defendant is signaling to viewers that they too should acquire a pirated copy and play the game now, without waiting for its release and without paying for it.
Prerelease piracy harms law-abiding Nintendo customers who may have been waiting for a particular game release for months or years and then may see gameplay and spoilers online that ruin their own surprise and delight when experiencing the game. In turn, prerelease piracy causes Nintendo tremendous harm, including millions of dollars of monetary harm from lost video game sales both of Nintendo's and its licensees' copyrighted games, and loss of goodwill."
According to the lawsuit, Nintendo is seeking $150,000 per infringement of its copyright, which, multiplied by 50+ alleged cases, results in over $7.5 million if Keighin loses the case, a fine that seems disconnected from the damages Nintendo claims to have suffered but aligns with their typical strategy of imposing heavy financial penalties on wrongdoers – penalties that the defendants will likely have to pay for the rest of their lives.
Unfortunately for Keighin, it seems Nintendo's unstoppable legal machine isn't about to stop turning every case of their rights being infringed into an illustrative message to "pirates," so unless he's hiding somewhere in international waters or North Korea, his chances of escaping the lawsuit seem pretty slim.
Speaking of Nintendo's legal machine, just last week, Palworld's developer Pocketpair published an update on Nintendo's lawsuit, stating that it and The Pokémon Company are seeking five million yen (about $33,000) plus late payment damages each for patent infringement. Interestingly, all three patents Pocketpair allegedly infringed were applied for and registered after Palworld's release, meaning this case actually has a chance of Nintendo finally getting a taste of their own medicine and losing to someone in a legal battle.
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