 Hey everyone! Welcome back to Nintendo Prime! It's Tuesday, November 2nd. I love how that lines up. Second day of our work week. Second day of the month. We got a couple big stories talked to you today. Let's just say a major hacking group has been destroyed in the court by Nintendo and actually other entities as well. So we'll get into that. Also we have an update on the potential sales of Nintendo Switch in this fiscal year as it looks like Nintendo might be falling short of their initial sales projections for the second time. Because Nintendo already lowered their projections once over their original 30 million. But we'll get into that and why that's happening here in a moment before we get into these stories. However, I want to remind you that it is November and we are doing something special this month. We are doing our own Prime giving. That's right. We have a new giveaway for this month that is based around the holiday of Thanksgiving here in the United States. And the idea for this giveaway is fairly simple. All you need to do is be subscribed to enter. And what do you win if you are subscribed? Or potentially win, of course. There's only going to be one winner. You will be winning a Nintendo Switch OLED bundle. So we're still putting all the pieces together for this bundle. Obviously, the Kudugra is the Nintendo Switch OLED, which even if you don't need it, maybe a family member or someone else will. There could potentially be games and other accessories. Again, this bundle is still being gathered and put together. But yeah, we'll be announcing new aspects every single week this month to this bundle. Obviously, the announcement for this week is that there is a bundle and Switch OLED is part of it. In addition, you will be able to choose a charity of your choice that we will be donating $100 to in the spirit of Thanksgiving and trying to help out those in need. So it'll be a charity that you choose. We will obviously vet that charity to make sure that it is an actual real charity, a reliable charity, and not one where 90% of the money doesn't actually go towards charity. But you'll be able to choose that charity. And we will obviously donate $100 to that charity as well because we want to make sure we're helping actual people in need, not just people who need or want video games and video game system, although we love giving to you guys as well. So there you go. By the way, there's still time to enter our giveaway from last month. We had a bit of a delay with that giveaway for DreadTober. So you can still find the links to that in the pinned comment and in the description. Two, we'll be announcing those winners later in this month before we're done with Prime Giving. Prime Giving obviously goes longer than that. Alright folks, let's get into today's Nintendo News. So do you guys remember Team Executor? They were actually the hot bees knees back in 2017 and 2018. They were one of the lead hacking groups that were hacking Nintendo Switch units. And while it's not illegal to hack Nintendo Switch units, so you might be like, how the hell are they being sued for hacking a system? They're allowed to do that. You're allowed to make custom firmware. What the hell's the problem? Well, they were selling devices that allowed you to easily hack your system. These devices would essentially cross a couple pins and voila, you could access the back end of the platform and boot load whatever OS or whatever you want. Some Linux and other things got on there. Now we all know that this can actually be done on those original switches with just a paperclip. You never needed to buy their thing, but they did become really, really popular back then for selling devices that enabled this to happen. And it was the profiteering off of this that obviously was illegal in the courtroom setting. And Team Executor actually have done this on a number of devices, not just Switch and got busted for it pretty bad and found themselves in a massive lawsuit by multiple companies, not just Nintendo. And the leader of this group, his name is somewhat ironically, Gary Bowser. Yes, we all know Doug Bowser runs Nintendo America and Team Executor had their own Bowser and Gary Bowser. So this was like Bowser versus Bowser in the courtroom. Pretty crazy. So he waived his rights, Gary Bowser did, for a public trial and having like an actual jury. He didn't want that probably because he felt like it would get even worse for him and increases lawyer fees on top of losing. So he did agree to a plea agreement, which included him pleading guilty to two charges. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to circumvent technological measures and to traffic circumventation devices. So basically, he agreed that he was attempting to circumvent current security measures on electronic devices, and that he was selling and moving illegal devices for that intent of, you know, of circumventing security measures. So he pled guilty to basically the two big charges that Nintendo and other companies are going after him for. Both charges can result in a maximum of five years imprisonment and a fine of up to $250,000, $500,000 for the latter charge. So that's a total of $750,000 and just, you know, fines that he could get for it from the government. These fines, by the way, don't go to Nintendo. These are just fees that go to the government for what he did. And while he's probably not going to see any imprisonment, I would say that's not where this ends. He's got mandatory special assessment charges. Assessment charges are where he is going to end up paying Nintendo $4.5 million in assessment charges to Nintendo. This is pretty crazy. So the case has been documented as impacting Nintendo, Sony, Sega, C64 and Atari states the team executors work selling illegal hacking devices and pirated software has caused more than $65 million, but less than $150 million in losses to the victims. So it isn't just Nintendo. As I said, there's other companies involved here, but Nintendo is the one getting the largest part of the assessment. So we're focusing on the Nintendo part of the assessment. It also knows that the illegal enterprise included a core group of individuals, including Max Laumann and Unig Chen and used a variety of names such as axiomgame.com and maxconsole.com. As part of his guilty plea, Bowser must now pay Nintendo of America an apportioned sum of $4.5 million. This figure is Bowser's to pay a loans. This isn't just like the total bounty pay for team executor. This is just Bowser himself. The other people are going to have to pay as well. Not in conjunction with other defendants who will be charged separately. Bowser must also disclose all of his assets and agrees to be to an abandonment of contraband, meaning he must consent to the destruction of a number of items which were seized from his residence in the Dominican Republic, including lots of hard drives, smart phones, mod chips, a Nintendo Switch, and a SNES Mini. And some people read this to like, oh, he shouldn't have to destroy all his Nintendo Switches. They should be. He doesn't have a lot of Nintendo Switches. It's a single Nintendo Switch and a single SNES Mini. He, guys, he wasn't hacking the devices and sending them to people. He was selling the little device you could use on your own Switch. So he's not, he's not saying they're stockpiling Switches and hack Switches in itself. That's not what he was doing. Anyways, he's got to destroy all this stuff or allow the government to destroy it all since they've already confiscated it from his home. So this is obviously a big win for Nintendo. I'm kind of unsure where to sit on this one. So part of me is all, yes, like anyone circumventing security measures. Team Executor, by the way, isn't some, some people will probably jump to Team Executor's defense because trying to defend hacking and who cares if they were selling these devices that get around Nintendo's security measures. Team Executor is well known publicly to be purporting and supporting the act of piracy. In fact, they were kind of rubbing it in people's faces when Nintendo initially sent them a cease and desist. They just kind of laughed at it and said nobody can stop us from supporting piracy. And that's where you kind of get into problems. And I know there's a lot of stuff over piracy and emulation and what's morally correct. And some people say if it's Nintendo, it's always morally correct. I don't really care what your personal stance on this bottom line is. It all is against the law. And they were not only profiting off of it. They were marketing themselves as the place to go to hack your switch, get our custom software, which by the way, they're not in trouble for the custom software. They're in trouble for that hardware device. So yeah, it's, it's a bit of a hot mess. And Team Executor's been around for a while. So it's shocking. It took so long for them to go down. And again, I listed the number of companies that are, you know, part of the suit and affected. So this is just a portion being paid to Nintendo. They have to pay a smaller amount to other companies as well. For, and this is just for Bowser himself, Doug Bowser, Gary Bowser, Gary, like what I'm just wondering about. But kind of, man, I like these names. So yeah, obviously this person knew what he was doing, located in the Dominican Republic to try to circumvent a lot of legalese didn't work out for them. So it is what it is. There are plenty of other switch hacking groups out there that are doing everything completely by the books and don't have to worry about anything. It's okay to explain to people how to hack your switches. You just can't be selling them devices to do it. And then in the midst of doing that, be promoting high res see, like if you create custom firmware for the Nintendo switch, you can't be actively publicly talking about piracy. We can all be aware that piracy happens and that people will make that individual choice to pirate games and to do so illegally. But we can't sit there and actually talk about it. So like when I brought up on Twitter, you know, the read you whatever people, I forget what I call them, but one of these switch emulators out there, I mentioned, oh, Nintendo's not going to like that. They're just publicly talking about how you can play Mario Party superstars right now on their emulator. It was more of a joking statement because Nintendo isn't going to like it, but also Nintendo can't do anything about it because they're not publicly telling you to go download illegal ROMs and pirate the game. They're just saying, hey, look, our emulator, which is 100% legal, can play this, which is also 100% legal if you make your own backup copy. So yeah, it's a very interesting situation where a team executor was just profiting and promoting piracy. So it is what it is. This is what happens when you're going to be so bold as to think you could just tell these multi-billion dollar corporations that, haha, you can't stop me. We're going to keep promoting and making money off this stuff. So it is what it is. Time to move on to our next story. So Nintendo Switch Unit production is reportedly down 20% compared to the original expectations for the current fiscal year from Nintendo. This report comes from Nikkei, a popular website slash newspaper out in Japan. And a lot of reports from Nikkei in regards to Nintendo end up being fairly accurate. Nintendo's original projections for the current fiscal year was actually 30 million units. They stated this last year. And Nintendo later reduced this number. They reduced the number around January of this year to 25.5 million units. And they said this was due to supply chain issues due to the semiconductor shortage, the worldwide. So they basically said, hey, we wanted to make 30 mil. We're selling out like crazy, but we're not going to be able to do it because we just know we can't get enough switches in the pipeline to hit 30 million. So 25.5. Nikkei is actually reporting that Nintendo's full year numbers are actually going to fall even short of that, closer to 24 million units due entirely to the shortage. While a Nintendo spokesperson did not actually confirm what Nikkei's report said, they did state the following when asked about it. We are assessing their impact on our production. So essentially they're assessing the semiconductor's shortest impact on production at the moment. So they're not really confirming or denying the report. They're just kind of like, yeah, we know, obviously we've already publicly announced semiconductors are causing us to fall short of our goal. And they're not going to deny that they might be falling even shorter than they anticipated. Again, falling 1.5 million shorter than the last projection isn't the end of the world. But it still is obviously interesting in a world where they launch Switch OLED and people were hoping that maybe there'd be a little uplift from that. But it's hard to uplift when they can't make enough. They can't get them out there. So the last lifetime to date sales data from Nintendo Switch had at 89 million units. And notably we do get an update on that figure. This Thursday we get our fiscal quarterly report and meeting. So we should have some good sales data coming out of that. These updates on a bunch of games and obviously the system. A lot of people hoping that it hit 95 million units. I'm not so sure that it did. Again, semiconductor shortages are a thing. So I think it might be more closer to like 92 million, which is still a really good figure. But obviously not where some Nintendo fans are hoping to see it because they want to see it cross 100 million units this fiscal year, which I think it will anyways, but they're going to be heavily reliant on whatever stock they've made for the holiday. All right, so then Nintendo Switch OLED is actually incredibly hard to get in certain parts of the world, especially in Japan. In Japan every single week they're still holding weekly lotteries to just get an opportunity to purchase a Switch OLED. So that's in Japan. Obviously the rest of the world doesn't necessarily do those lottery systems. But I mean, even here in the United States, whenever they go in stock online or whenever they end up appearing in stores, they tend to be gone. If not that day, the next day, which shows that there is significant demand for Switch and Switch OLED right now, which isn't surprising. So then we're heading to the holiday season. We just had a major Mario Party game come out that's likely going to sell a Crablo. We had Metroid Dread, obviously we have Sherman God, we tend to see five coming up here November 12th. We obviously have Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Chinese Pearl later this month. So that's always a big unit driver. Advance Wars was delayed. So December is sort of a light month, but then boom we hit Pokemon Legends Arceus in January and we all know about the massive lineup next year. So Nintendo knows that demand for Switch is likely not going anywhere just based on software lineup alone, let alone the fact that the pandemic has helped increase demand for all electronic devices. And Nintendo doesn't seem to have seen a slowdown in that demand. They just can only get so many units out the door and they're pretty much selling all of units. Now it's not impossibly hard to get your hands on some sort of Switch, whether it's a Switch Lite, a normal Switch, or the Switch OLED. So it's not impossibly hard to get your hands on these things, at least here in the United States, but it isn't like they're just always readily available in stock. Sometimes you'll go to buy certain colors of light and they're out of stock and you got to wait a week or two. You'll go to buy a normal Switch and sometimes they'll be like, oh, if you buy it now on Amazon, it's not going to ship to you for two and a half weeks, which means they don't actually have the unit now. They're selling you a unit from a future shipment coming in, which just pushes down the road the problem of being out of stock. Same thing for Switch OLED. So yeah, you can still go into some stores sometimes and grab a Switch, but they're not like they're readily there. Now they're obviously more readily available than Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Series S, and Series X, but still it's not like they're just easy to get for everyone. So we just need to keep that in mind, which obviously makes the fact that we're doing a big Switch OLED bundle giveaway with also $100 going to charity this month. Just extra special because again, we get to help yet another person who might be struggling to get a Switch, let alone that $100 hopefully going towards helping people who are really, really in need. By the way, we're not officially part of this campaign, but I do believe in Team C's and cleaning up our oceans. I've already made my own donation to Team C's, so I'll leave a link to the description as well for anyone who would like to help clean up our oceans and even give just a dollar would be appreciated. One dollar equals one pound of trash out of the ocean, just like Team Trees. I find these causes vitally important because we need to keep our earth, you know, really clean it up for our children. I literally have children. So I want to get our planet in a better state for them. So they get to enjoy all the pleasantries I've gotten to enjoy with nature growing up. All right, folks. That being said, I'm Nintendo RoboJance from Nintendo Prime. Thank you so much for tuning in today. And you know what, we'll catch you in the very next video whenever that is, you know, we're having a lovely week.