A US federal court has ordered James Williams, known online as Archbox, to pay Nintendo 4.5 million dollars. Williams was a moderator of r/SwitchPirates, a subreddit that grew to nearly 190,000 members. The judgment came on September 23 by default: he never showed up in court.
Where the 4.5 million comes from
Nintendo sued in the summer of 2024 in the US District Court for the Western District of Washington. According to the company, Williams had been running and promoting several pirate "shops" since 2019, with huge libraries of Switch games available for download. Nintendo's filing spoke of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of unauthorized copies. He was found through his own carelessness: according to TorrentFreak, investigators linked the Archbox account on Reddit to a Nintendo account he had used to send a console in for repair, and the repaired console was shipped back to his home address.
Nintendo did not try to count damages across every game. It picked 30 specific titles, including Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Pikmin 4, and asked for the maximum US law allows for willful copyright infringement: 150,000 dollars per title. Thirty times 150,000 is exactly 4.5 million, and the court granted the full amount.
- Money. 4.5 million dollars, 150,000 for each of 30 games.
- Shops. Williams must immediately shut down every online "shop" he runs or controls.
- Social media. All of his accounts used to spread the libraries have to go too.
Whether he will actually pay is another matter. According to Nintendo Life, Williams has been mostly unreachable since the case began. A default judgment gives Nintendo the right to collect, but it does not put money in the bank by itself. For the company, the precedent and the closed shops seem to matter more.
How much Nintendo has won from pirates before
This is not the first case, and not even the biggest. Nintendo's largest win came in 2018 against the owner of the LoveROMs and LoveRETRO sites: 12 million dollars. In 2021 a court awarded 2.1 million in the RomUniverse case. In 2024 the developers of the Yuzu emulator agreed to pay 2.4 million and shut the project down, and in September 2025 the seller behind the Modded Hardware store, which sold chips and cartridges for hacking the Switch, got a 2 million judgment. Among these cases, Archbox ranks second by amount.
All of these amounts except RomUniverse and the current case are settlements or judgments the defendants agreed to themselves. So the bars on the chart show what Nintendo won on paper, not what it actually collected.
Sources
The judgment against Williams, the amount, the 30-game calculation and the court's orders: Nintendo Life, September 25, 2026, and VGC. The size of the subreddit and how Williams was found: TorrentFreak and TweakTown. Earlier cases LoveROMs, RomUniverse and Yuzu: the Wikipedia article on Nintendo's intellectual property protection. The Modded Hardware case: GameSpot and Tom's Hardware.
Console photo: Wikimedia Commons.
