BODY: He called himself a pirate on Reddit and said he wouldn't pay Nintendo $50 for a game. It ended up costing him $4.5 million.
On September 23, 2026, US federal judge Lauren King entered a default judgment against James Williams — known online as "archbox," a moderator of the r/SwitchPirates subreddit — awarding Nintendo the full amount it had requested: $4.5 million, roughly ¥710 million at current rates.
Nintendo filed suit in June 2024, alleging that Williams had "operated, supervised, and initiated" multiple pirate shops distributing large libraries of unauthorized Switch games under names including Jack-in-the-Shop, Turtle in the Shop, and NekoDrive. Crucially, Nintendo said Williams had already signed a cease-and-desist letter and then ignored it — the shops did not shut down until March 2024.
The damages figure is mechanical rather than dramatic: 30 game titles at the statutory maximum of $150,000 each. Judge King found that ceiling justified partly because Williams never answered the complaint at all, despite clearly knowing about the case — he had retained counsel to deal with Nintendo's subpoenas to Google. The court also ordered him to deactivate the Reddit, Instagram, X, TikTok, Discord, and Telegram accounts used for infringement. Whether Nintendo ever sees the money is another matter; with no response and no disclosed assets, collection remains uncertain.
The insider take
Nintendo's legal department in Kyoto has long operated on a logic that looks disproportionate from the outside and perfectly rational from the inside: the point is never the check. Japanese rights-holders tend to pursue misogi — a visible, documented, citable outcome — because the deterrent lives in the headline, not the bank transfer. That's why Nintendo asked for the statutory maximum on all 30 titles instead of negotiating, and why it pressed for a default judgment in October 2025 rather than quietly letting a defunct case lapse. Domestic coverage in Japan, GIGAZINE included, frames these rulings almost as seasonal weather reports — the same company that pursued Yuzu, Team Xecuter, and countless ROM sites is simply doing what it always does. The message to the next moderator is the ¥710 million number, and that message is now permanently on the record.
Originally reported by GIGAZINE (Japanese).