FBI says recently seized ROM sites enabled $170M worth of piracy

Nintendo has never shied away from fighting piracy. Following on from the takedown of two popular Switch emulators last year, Nintendo has now turned its attention back towards ROM sites offering free downloads of Switch titles. According to the FBI, a couple of recently seized domains enabled as much as $170M worth of downloads.

While most of the tech-literate world knows that piracy often doesn’t correlate to ‘lost revenue’, the powers that be still like to use lost revenue figures when assessing the damage any one individual piracy site has caused. Following the FBI’s seizure of the nsw2u domain, as well as a few other Nintendo Switch and PS4 ROM sites, it is claimed that as much as $170M was lost due to these websites.

“Between February 28, 2025, and May 28, 2025, records indicate a total of 3.2 million downloads occurred on these sites from the most used download service. These actions resulting in an estimated loss of $170 million.”

Naturally, this number will have been worked out using the full-priced retail cost of each game, multiplied by the number of unique downloads. To get a more accurate figure, you would have to rank each game based on the number of downloads, and then factor in the average selling price, rather than the MSRP, as games regularly get significant discounts within months of release.

KitGuru Says: As always, when one piracy site goes down, there will be another ready to take its place. 

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