If you plan to purchase any Switch 1 pre-owned games for your Nintendo Switch 2, be careful. Some players are reporting that their consoles and being blocked from accessing online services after trying to play.
In a thread on Redditand on lots of social media sites, Nintendo Switch 2 owners are conversing on how they purchased legitimately pre-owned games from places like GameStop, only to have their Switch 2s banned when trying to play them. A lot of the reasons behind these bans appear to be that people who traded in these game copies to second-hand stores dumped the files of the game, so when you put it into the Switch 2, the console can’t tell who dumped the files and just bans whoever tries to play the game on the console.
PSA: be EXTREMELY careful buying used Nintendo Switch games. Bought an old copy of Bayo 3 on eBay and WELP, my 1-month-old $450 Switch 2 is BANNED.This cart must have been dumped by whoever owned it before me.Hoping Nintendo will understand/unlock for me, else, this SUCKS!pic.twitter.com/ev0VXNVQU6
The bans don’t come straight away either. You could be playing the game for some time and then suddenly get an error message pop-up that alerts you that you have been banned from using online services, and then are told to reach out to support to dispute it. It’s another sore spot on the Nintendo Switch 2, which can brick and destroy your console at a moment’s notice – not very consumer-friendly.
Thankfully, a lot of these bans are being reversed by Nintendo when contacting the NOA customer support, and then can prove the game they were trying to play was bought legitimately, but it does put a spanner in the works for anyone looking to buy second-hand Switch games in the future to use on Switch 2. As there is no way to tell which cartridges have had their data dumped or not. Something apparently not even Nintendo thought about.
Has this happened to anyone else, too? I, for one, know I won’t be picking up any pre-owned games at the risk of ruining my console if I keep seeing stories like this. And I don’t have faith in the company to patch in something that removes this issue if it becomes more widespread. But what do you think?
