Nintendo games, especially first-party titles, have long been the number one target for pirates. Although manufacturers strive to pass on classic games, as game prices continue to rise, the recent news that the shells of Nintendo Switch game cartridges (including the yet-to-be-released Switch2 cartridges) have been cracked has allowed pirates to repackage the copied cartridges, making the problem of game piracy even worse.
According to the first disclosure on the Reddit forum, these copied cassettes can almost look like real ones. Although there are some detailed features to identify authenticity, it is difficult for ordinary players to detect them, which will greatly contribute to the proliferation of piracy. Some collectors of physical games joke that they will follow the unorthodox method of "licking cassettes" - using a special bitter coating on Nintendo cassettes to verify authenticity, but it is not yet certain whether this anti-counterfeiting technology will be counterfeited.
Cassette duplication has become a cancer in the industry. As the price of classic game cartridges such as "Pokémon" has skyrocketed, speculators have dumped counterfeit cartridges in large quantities, which has in turn caused the price of genuine collections to soar due to scarcity. It is worth noting that this problem has spread to all game platforms using cartridge media.
As pirated games become rampant, the professional counterfeiting community r/gameverifying emerged. With Switch games added to the counterfeit list, the popularity of this forum will surely continue to rise. Although Nintendo continues to crack down on piracy tools such as emulators and ROMs, in the face of increasingly rampant physical piracy, the battle to defend genuine copies has obviously entered a more complex stage.