The FBI and the Dutch FIOD have seized multiple piracy websites offering video games for the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4. The sites had been active for over four years before being taken down and had an estimated 3.2 million downloads between February and May 2025, raking up $170 million in losses to the game publishers.
The FBI’s takedown announcement lists the sites as “online criminal marketplaces providing pirated versions of popular video games.” The following sites were taken down:
- nsw2u.com
- nswdl.com
- game-2u.com
- bigngame.com
- ps4pkg.com
- ps4pkg.net
- mgnetu.com
The most popular of these was NSw2u. The site was added to the EU’s counterfeit and piracy watch list in May 2025, and Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany, France, and the UK have all banned access to the site in their respective countries.
Anyone visiting the sites now will see a takedown banner notifying them that the domain has been seized by federal authorities. The announcement didn’t mention any specific steps the FBI took to dismantle the infrastructure of these sites apart from seizing their domains, so we can see them pop up again under new names in the future, as is often the case with piracy or other cybercrime website takedowns.
Piracy is a rampant issue in both the PC and mobile gaming world, and has been for quite a while. Apart from hurting developer revenue, it also opens up a new, and rather popular avenue for threat actors to offer malware-laced games that unsuspecting gamers install on their devices without a worry.
According to a VPNCentral report, out of the 3.3 billion gamers in 2023, 1 out of every 10 admit to having illegally downloaded or played a pirated video game in the last three months. What’s worse is that almost 3.2 million Windows PCs were compromised by malware from pirated software and games in 2021, a number sure to grow in 2025.
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