Nintendo is suing a man who allegedly repeatedly streamed pirated and emulated Nintendo Switch games, sometimes before they were released, and at times directed his audience to popular Switch emulators and other piracy tools, according to a new lawsuit viewed by 404 Media.
It’s common for Nintendo to send cease and desist letters, file takedown requests with platforms that host emulators, or sue companies that create piracy tools. But it appears that in this case the defendant, Jesse Keighin, who usually goes by EveryGameGuru online, got under Nintendo’s skin because he didn’t stop streaming the emulated games in response to the company’s usual tactics.
Instead, whenever one of his channels was shut down he opened new channels on other platforms, directed his seemingly small audience to pirate Nintendo games, and at times contacted Nintendo to tease the company directly. The lawsuit shows that Nintendo followed Keighin’s online activity closely, tracking him across Discord, YouTube, Twitch, Kick, and a number of lesser known streaming platforms.
“On October 24, 2024, after certain platforms had taken down his unlawful streams as a result of Nintendo’s enforcement actions, he sent Nintendo a letter boasting that he has ‘a thousand burner channels’ to stream from and [he] ‘can do this all day,’” Nintendo says in its lawsuit. According to Nintendo, after his monetized YouTube channel was taken down, Keighin started adding a CashApp handle to his streams seeking donations from the audience.
According to Nintendo, on October 17, 2024, Keighin also told the company that he “will actively help people find newer and updated copies of Ryujinx and Yuzu,” two Nintendo Switch emulators the company that were taken down from GitHub this year after their creators were contacted by Nintendo. Keighin also said that he was helping people play Nintendo Switch games “on their PC with no need to buy [Nintendo’s] hardware,” according to the lawsuit.
“LOVE YA’LL! CAPITALISM IS CANCER! MY CHANNEL IS BEING DELETED FOR SHARING GAMEPLAY VIDEOS! THIS IS YOUR REWARD!,” Keighin said in one of the public posts sharing links to those emulators.
Of particular concern to Nintendo, it seems, is that Keighin wasn’t just streaming emulated, pirated games, but that he was streaming Nintendo games before they were released.
“On at least fifty occasions in the last two years, Defendant has streamed gameplay footage of pirated copies of at least ten different Nintendo games without authorization—all before those titles were released to the public,” Nintendo said in the lawsuit. “All of these streams were unauthorized and all compromise Nintendo’s legitimate prerelease marketing. They also promote and encourage downloading of pirated copies of unpublished games. Defendant’s streams often consist merely of him playing Nintendo’s leaked games without commentary for extended periods of time.”
As an example, Nintendo points to Keighin’s streaming of Mario & Luigi: Brothership on YouTube and other platforms on October 22. Mario & Luigi: Brothership is one of Nintendo’s biggest games of the year, and it was officially released this Thursday, November 7.
I could only find one active EveryGameGuru account at the time of writing. It included archives of previous streams, but not a stream of Mario & Luigi: Brothership, which appears to have been removed. That channel has only 43 followers. A screenshot in the lawsuit of one of Keighin’s YouTube channels shows it had around 1,730 subscribers. Another screenshot in the lawsuit showing Keighin’s Kick channel shows it only had one viewer at one point in time.
According to the lawsuit, Nintendo is seeking $150,000 per infringement of its copyright. Conservatively, going by Nintendo’s claim that Keighin streamed pirated gameplay footage “on at least fifty occasions in the last two years,” he’s looking at $7.5 million.
