They literally have no way to do so. There is no tool in the toolset to distinguish a cart someone else bought at the store from your own carts you bought at the store and then moved from a Switch 1 to a Switch 2.
This is absolutely not true; it’s absolutely possible and even suspected that individual game carts themselves are signed with unique serial IDs or even full certificates or cryptographic signatures.
I think it’s more likely the previous owner did dump the cart on to a MIG Switch or similar ROM cart. While the NS1 cannot tell the difference; it can still be updated to do so.
I think it’s likely that in order to play titles online; your Switch 1 has to get the Cart Serial number from the cart and package it all up nicely and sign it neatly with the certificate from the system. So if said Nintendo Switch 1 already transferred that title out to a Switch 2, then there would be a record on file with Nintendo saying “NS1 with Serial XYZ transferred Title cart ABC with serial DEF to Switch 2 with serial GHI”. Then when you put that cart into a different Switch 2 it notices and informs Nintendo of the new title and cart serial…which then immediately picks up on the change of ownership.
That might not raise red flags if you handed the cart over to your friend next door; but it certainly might raise red flags if you air-mailed the cart over to your buddy a few countries over.
People keep saying this. Being able to identify carts is not the same as being able to identify resold carts.
There is no tool to identify resold carts. People can and do travel and move to different countries with their consoles. There can be multiple accounts per console. People can feasibly have two consoles right next to each other connected to different networks and swap carts between them. People can change consoles because they upgraded or because they have multiple consoles in the household. And people can and do resell carts all the time.
And there is no way to differentiate those scenarios even if you can/could track each cart individually.
There could be a record of which consoles have played which carts, but that gives you exactly zero information about how many owners the cart has had.
Switch accounts aren’t associated to consoles and physical game entitlements aren’t associated to accounts. Any account can be in any console at any time and instantly show in in multiple places and while you could account for travel times it’s a pretty pointless thing to do that, to my knowledge, Nintendo is not doing.
What is more likely is that a cart showing up many times at the same time could flag it. Which is what everybody, including the guy who had the problem, is hypothesizing. This has nothing to do with reselling or transfering ownership of the physical game, beyond the fact that buying a used, dumped cart is the only way to end up with a dumped cart without knowing there are potentially thousands of copies of it floating around.
This is absolutely not true; it’s absolutely possible and even suspected that individual game carts themselves are signed with unique serial IDs or even full certificates or cryptographic signatures.
I think it’s more likely the previous owner did dump the cart on to a MIG Switch or similar ROM cart. While the NS1 cannot tell the difference; it can still be updated to do so.
I think it’s likely that in order to play titles online; your Switch 1 has to get the Cart Serial number from the cart and package it all up nicely and sign it neatly with the certificate from the system. So if said Nintendo Switch 1 already transferred that title out to a Switch 2, then there would be a record on file with Nintendo saying “NS1 with Serial XYZ transferred Title cart ABC with serial DEF to Switch 2 with serial GHI”. Then when you put that cart into a different Switch 2 it notices and informs Nintendo of the new title and cart serial…which then immediately picks up on the change of ownership.
That might not raise red flags if you handed the cart over to your friend next door; but it certainly might raise red flags if you air-mailed the cart over to your buddy a few countries over.
People keep saying this. Being able to identify carts is not the same as being able to identify resold carts.
There is no tool to identify resold carts. People can and do travel and move to different countries with their consoles. There can be multiple accounts per console. People can feasibly have two consoles right next to each other connected to different networks and swap carts between them. People can change consoles because they upgraded or because they have multiple consoles in the household. And people can and do resell carts all the time.
And there is no way to differentiate those scenarios even if you can/could track each cart individually.
There could be a record of which consoles have played which carts, but that gives you exactly zero information about how many owners the cart has had.
Switch accounts aren’t associated to consoles and physical game entitlements aren’t associated to accounts. Any account can be in any console at any time and instantly show in in multiple places and while you could account for travel times it’s a pretty pointless thing to do that, to my knowledge, Nintendo is not doing.
What is more likely is that a cart showing up many times at the same time could flag it. Which is what everybody, including the guy who had the problem, is hypothesizing. This has nothing to do with reselling or transfering ownership of the physical game, beyond the fact that buying a used, dumped cart is the only way to end up with a dumped cart without knowing there are potentially thousands of copies of it floating around.