After warning against pirating Nintendo Switch games and praising Nintendo’s “extremely strong anti-piracy measures,” prominent hacker SciresM has now uncovered confirmation that the company has started to ban game card certificates.
“Looks like we’ve got confirmation that Nintendo is banning game card certificates (I guess people aren’t taking my advice…). The relevant error for trying to use a game card with a banned cert is 0x1F727C — 2124-4025,” he wrote.
Whenever you attempt to connect online in a game, it starts a process that checks multiple tokens while authorising the Nintendo Account that you are signed into. The anti-piracy measures will then detect games that have been pirated and then prevent them from being used.
“In the Game Card case, Nintendo can detect whether or not the user connecting has data from a Nintendo-authorized Game Card for the correct title,” SciresM explained earlier this week.
“This solves the 3DS-era issue of Game Card header data being shared between games. Additionally, there’s a fair amount of other, unknown (encrypted) data in a certificate being uploaded — and certificates are also linked to Nintendo Accounts when gold points are redeemed. Sharing of certificates should be fairly detectable, for Nintendo.”
