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Nintendo Sues RomUniverse.com for Game Piracy

The legal action represents Nintendo's latest attempt to crack down on ROM sites, which offer unauthorized copies of the company's games.

Michael Kan
 & Michael Kan Principal Reporter

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Nintendo is suing the owner of RomUniverse.com for allegedly pirating its games and making them available for download.

RomUniverse has been bootlegging titles for nearly every Nintendo game console, including the recently released Nintendo Switch, according to the company's lawsuit, which was filed on Tuesday and spotted by Polygon.

The site appears to have a giant catalog of game ROMs (digital copies), which go back to the original NES console. For a one-time fee of $30, gamers receive unlimited file downloads from the site. Non-paying users, on the other hand, are capped at three free downloads per week.

But according to Nintendo, RomUniverse is guilty of piracy. "Hundreds of thousands of copies of Nintendo games have been illegally downloaded through the website, including nearly 300,000 downloads of copies of pirated Nintendo Switch games and more than 500,000 copies of pirated Nintendo 3DS games," its lawsuit claims, citing RomUniverse's own download statistics.

Last year, Nintendo also sued an Arizona man for pirating Nintendo games on two sites, LoveROMs.com and LoveRETRO.co. The man and his wife later agreed to pay Nintendo $12 million for the infringement.

Nintendo's latest lawsuit names California-based Matthew Storman as a defendant, as well as 10 other "John Does." It goes on to claim Storman told members of his site back in 2009 that he would begin stockpiling pirated Nintendo game ROMs.

"In 2018, around the time that Nintendo successfully enforced its intellectual property rights against other infringing ROM websites, defendant Storman bragged that his website would continue to offer Nintendo ROMs," the lawsuit adds. "After the removal of the other infringing ROM websites, internet traffic to the website increased."

Nintendo is demanding Storman and the other unnamed defendants pay up to $150,000 for each pirated game, and up to $2 million for each infringement involving Nintendo's trademark. The company is also demanding the owners of RomUniverse pull all the pirated games down and transfer the website's domain to Nintendo.

RomUniverse and Nintendo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

About Our Expert

Michael Kan

Michael Kan

Principal Reporter

My Experience

I've been a journalist for over 15 years. I got my start as a schools and cities reporter in Kansas City and joined PCMag in 2017, where I cover satellite internet services, cybersecurity, PC hardware, and more. I'm currently based in San Francisco, but previously spent over five years in China, covering the country's technology sector.

Since 2020, I've covered the launch and explosive growth of SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet service, writing 600+ stories on availability and feature launches, but also the regulatory battles over the expansion of satellite constellations, fights with rival providers like AST SpaceMobile and Amazon, and the effort to expand into satellite-based mobile service. I've combed through FCC filings for the latest news and driven to remote corners of California to test Starlink's cellular service.

I also cover cyber threats, from ransomware gangs to the emergence of AI-based malware. In 2024 and 2025, the FTC forced Avast to pay consumers $16.5 million for secretly harvesting and selling their personal information to third-party clients, as revealed in my joint investigation with Motherboard.

I also cover the PC graphics card market. Pandemic-era shortages led me to camp out in front of a Best Buy to get an RTX 3000. I'm now following how the AI-driven memory shortage is impacting the entire consumer electronics market. I'm always eager to learn more, so please jump in the comments with feedback and send me tips.

The Best Tech I've Had:

  • My first video game console: a Nintendo Famicom
  • I loved my Sega Saturn despite PlayStation's popularity.
  • The iPod Video I received as a gift in college
  • Xbox 360 FTW
  • The Galaxy Nexus was the first smartphone I was proud to own.
  • The PC desktop I built in 2013, which still works to this day.

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