Gary Bowser and Team Xecuter have been selling illegal mods for the Switch, according to Nintendo. Now they are to pay $2,500 per board.
Nintendo has gone one step further in the legal action surrounding developer Gary Bowser and his Team Xecuter. The company is suing him for damages of $2,500 per Xecuter product sold and $250,000 per trademark infringement. Xecuter stands for various hacking tools for the Nintendo Switch. Accordingly, Bowser infringed Nintendo’s trademark rights by selling and marketing hacks. This is reported by gaming magazine Polygon. The site has also uploaded the legal document.
Gary Bowser does not mean the full name of Super Mario’s spiky-armed nemesis Bowser. Gary Bowser distributes hardware mods for the Nintendo Switch. The Xecuter SX boards run the Xecuter SX OS operating system and allow various NSP files to run on the Nintendo Switch – the game format compatible with the console. Modified NSPs can contain ROMs of various games that were not actually intended for the Switch or usually have to be purchased for money.
Xecuter team member was arrested back in 2020
As recently as October 2020, Bowser and another member of his team were arrested. The reason: they were engaged in trademark infringement and illegal trade. According to Nintendo, this would amount to an international piracy ring. The accusation is no coincidence: After all, it is possible to run illegally copied Nintendo games on the Switch for free with Xecuter mods.
Already since 2013, the Xecuter team had been selling hacks for Nintendo consoles. At that time, mods were sold for the handheld Nintendo 3DS. Team Xecuter is also controversial among the hacking and modding community, as it sells mods for profit, contrary to the open-source and tinkering mentality.
