Outside of the small scene groups dumping new releases, why would someone wanting to pirate go to the trouble of buying a legit copy of a game and this device, only to dump the game resulting in effectively the same file that someone else has already put online?

The people who are putting game roms online generally aren’t randos. It’s scene release groups, who already have plenty of ways to dump carts without this, otherwise we wouldn’t be seeing roms released same day or earlier than the shelf date.

You can already dump games with any Switch you can run homebrew (and therefore pirated games) on. I’ve done it with my carts so I don’t have to juggle the little things or bring a case with me. You don’t need this dumper to do it, or to get the files to put on the MiG flash card this is for. Normal dumps off the internet work fine in the cart for pirated game playing on newer switches.

So yeah, it’s a piracy device. But I just don’t see the use case here for it to meaningfully aid piracy at all.

Look, I have pirated games on a ton of consoles and handhelds, including the Switch, and I’ve also dumped my own carts/discs. One thing I’ve never done, or never heard of someone doing, is using one of these dumping tools and then selling the used copy of the game.

I’m sure there are people out there that have, and in the days of game rental stores people absolutely would rent a game and dump it, I used to do it with music CDs. It was harder to grab shit from the intenet back then though, so it was easier than downloading.

If I like a game enough to buy it, I’m not going to the trouble of getting an insulting amount for reselling it. If it was crap enough that I no longer wanted it, why would I dump the cart to a file?

Nowadays, you can download ten switch games in maybe an hour and a half, and every single game is downloadable normally on release day.

Why would you spend extra money on the dumper and lose money from reselling the game for less than you spent, when you can just download it for free?