Nintendo of Japan Bans Foreign Payments on E-Shop, Citing "Fraud Prevention" But Really it's to Stop Gaijins From Buying Uncenso...
Nintendo of Japan has announced that, starting March 25, 2025, it will no longer accept credit cards issued outside Japan or PayPal accounts set up overseas as valid payment methods on the Japanese Nintendo eShop and My Nintendo Store. Officially, the stat...
Nintendo has only managed to escape heavy criticism because Sony, Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft, and the rest of the AAA gaming industry have been competing with each other to see who can self-immolate the fastest.
Their crackdowns on streamers and fan artists, constant use of artificial scarcity to encourage FOMO (which only helps scalpers and hurts their customers), war against emulation, and censorship of American releases should earn them much more ire than it has. One of these days, it is all going to blow up in their faces.
The fact that gamers still see them as the "best" gaming company really shows just what a dumpster fire the entire gaming industry is these days.
I have been hating Nintendo for a while for their abuse of the copyright system
As a kid I didn't realize that the "Nintendo Seal of Quality" was part of a licensing scheme where Nintendo forced third parties to pay them to produce their cartridges and limited how many games they could release. I had no idea what the lockout chip was and why some third party cartridges were shaped differently.
Ostensibly it was to prevent the same shovelware that caused video games to crash during the Atari era, but how wonderful for them that it also funneled extra profits and control to Nintendo.
is Nintendo being a piece of shit or did they make this deal with mastercard and paypal who we know have been going after uncensored Japanese content?
Probably both.
Anyways i used to buy nintendo because they were the only ones allowing uncensored games, but now that they've gone the way of censorship, i won't buy from them anymore.
Is this actually new? It's been next to impossible to link your foreign payment details to a JP account for years now. I've always just bought JP eshop cards from places like PlayAsia.
You could use paypal on Nintendo's shop and they didn't care where the account was located. Now they will refuse payments from paypal accounts that aren't located in Japan.
Don't buy their games anymore if they behave like this. Switch is all able to be emulated, with luck switch 2 will join that quickly as well. Nintendo does not want your money, don't give it to them then.
Nintendo is the worst of the console companies for wanting to have complete control over what content you can have. It's like having Apple as a video game company.
Of course XBox is probably on its last console and Sony isn't really any better. They're all pushing woke and censoring content on Western releases. At least with Xbox you can use a VPN to buy the game cheaper in another region and then just turn it off and play as normal.
This isn't a case of "if I can't buy this product, I'll buy the other one", these people have a non-buynary choice. They wanted the product, they wanted to give money to the company, and wanted to give them money so much they made foreign accounts, likely in foreign languages, just to give them money instead of pirating for free, faster, easier, and with more gameplay options and accessibility. They bent over backwards to pay for an inferior product. And now you don't want those sales?
It's probably VISA brandishing their dick again, not NoJ or NoA policies, sacrificing a small but very loyal fanbase on VISA's altar for continued operations. Still, very poor optics.
Maybe they'll accept my Visa-san card.