Nintendo of America announced on Thursday that a member of the executer hacker team was sentenced to 40 months in prison for his participation in the team’s creation and sale of tools for pirated video games for Nintendo switches.
Gary W. “Gary OPA” Bowser was initially prosecuted in Seattle in August 2020 together with Max “maxilien” louarn and Chen Yuanning. Of course, Bowser’s last name is the same as Bowser’s American name. Bowser is a traditional opponent of the Super Mario Bros. game series and the current president of Nintendo of America, Doug Bowser, just to make everything here more surreal.
The executer team created modification devices and dedicated hardware for various video game consoles for modification and occasional “prison break”. Since at least 2013, the group has been active in the field of game modification, producing modification tools for the previous Nintendo system and the original Playstation, Xbox and Xbox 360.
Its modification of the switch is ostensibly to support “self-made” scenes, so interested players can create and design their own games. Nintendo had previously sued several stores offering team executer products in June 2020. In response, xecter told torrentfresh, a news website focusing on file sharing, that its mod is mainly a tool of tinker and has proved their rationality under the protection of the “right to repair” movement.
Xecter’s “SX OS” modification of the switch allows users to install a new operating system that enables several interesting options, such as overclocking system or the ability to wirelessly connect Playstation 5 controllers to Nintendo switches. According to the plea agreement submitted by Bowser last October, the overall goal behind SX OS is always to make software piracy profitable. It is reported that xeuter also maintains illegal files of switch games and other software and charges access fees for this.
Bowser, a 52 year old Canadian citizen, is responsible for the public relations and website operation of the executor team. He was arrested in the Dominican Republic in October 2020 and extradited to New Jersey for trial. Bowser, louarn and Chen were charged with one count of conspiracy to commit telecommunications fraud, four counts of telecommunications fraud, one count of conspiracy to circumvent technical measures and trafficking in circumvention equipment, four counts of trafficking in circumvention equipment and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering.
In late October, Bao Ze submitted a plea agreement, in which he admitted two of the 11 charges, conspiring to circumvent technical measures and trafficking circumvention equipment, and agreed that the product motivation of the executor team was always for-profit piracy. According to the terms of the agreement, Bowser said that executor had generated tens of millions of dollars in sales and agreed to pay Nintendo $4.5 million in compensation, while awarding Nintendo an additional $10 million in another judgment last December.
Federal prosecutors initially sentenced Bowser to 60 months in prison for “sending messages to other similar hacker organizations” as a deterrent. Bowser’s defender had advocated a more lenient sentence of 19 months because he was only a public relations officer / website manager, but this difference was clearly broken.
As for bozer’s co accused, Luan was reportedly detained in his native France and his own trial was postponed to early January. There was no further information on this issue at the time of writing this article. If anything, lune’s potential trouble is much bigger than bozer, because he spent some time in the United States in the 1990s for phone card fraud. Chinese citizen Chen has not been arrested.
It is also worth noting that the mistake of the executer team can be said to be its profit motive. There are many other efforts to repair and modify the hardware and operating system of the switch, usually on any video game console; Give nerds something with a hard disk, and they’ll find a way to at least make it run Linux.
Nintendo itself refused to allow users to back up their saved files locally, thus promoting the creation of a hacker community around the switch. It can be said that xecter’s SX operating system has many functions that this switch should have, such as allowing you to run the switching game on the external hard disk like using Playstation 4 / 5.
Even so, the xeuter team’s profit motive means that it obviously flies too close to the sun. SX operating system hackers are very popular and reportedly earn tens of millions of dollars in regular sales. In 2018, it actually attracted criticism from the piracy community because its own software requires a paid license to work. (of course, the license has been hacked.)
Although this is unlikely to slow the development of switch homebrew in any measurable way, it does set a huge precedent for others who want to make money through switch