If you follow Nintendo news, you may know that a hacker named Gary Bowser (not to be confused with Nintendo America"s president Doug Bowser or the Mario supervillain Bowser) was arrested last year for being a member of piracy group "Team-Xecuter". This group enabled Switch owners to hack their Switch devices to play pirated games on the console.
Although Team-Xecuter reportedly bagged millions of dollars from this illegal operation, Bowser played a relatively minor role in this process, receiving roughly $320,000 over the course of seven years. Regardless, he was sued by Nintendo and was sentenced to 40 months in prison along with a $15 million fine, out of which $10 million is damages to Nintendo.
Now, Bowser has reportedly been released from a federal U.S. prison due to good behavior and is on his way back to his home country, Canada. Despite being freed from the detention center, Bowser faces a difficult road ahead. He has to pay Nintendo a maximum of 25-30% of his gross monthly salary once he lands a stable job until the damages are paid off. Currently, he has paid $175 through multiple $25 payments based on the wages he was getting in prison.
It"s unlikely that 51-year-old Gary Bowser will ever be able to pay off his fines completely, but that"s not Nintendo"s goal here either. While the company claimed that it spent $65 million to upgrade the Switch"s anti-piracy measures to circumvent Team-Xecuter"s tactics, the fine is just to deter future hackers from going down the same path. Nintendo had previously stated that:
This is a very significant moment for us. It’s the purchase of video games that sustains Nintendo and the Nintendo ecosystem, and it is the games that make the people smile. It’s for that reason that we do all we can to prevent games on Nintendo systems from being stolen.
Bowser has six months to go before he begins paying his next installments to Nintendo in order to pay off the remaining ~$10 million.
Source: TorrentFreak via Nintendo Life | Image via Know Your Meme