SerpApi.Org
Sorry, gamers, but Nintendo is urging a US district court to dismiss a class-action lawsuit that demands it share any Trump tariff refunds with its customers.
As Game File reports, Nintendo responded on Monday to the lawsuit filed in April by two US consumers, who were upset that customers had to pay higher prices after the Trump administration imposed tariffs on Asian markets.
The Supreme Court has since struck down the bulk of Trump’s tariffs, prompting US Customs and Border Protection to refund about $71 billion so far. Nintendo stands to recover a fortune, but the company is rejecting the notion that US consumers should be entitled to the funds.
Nintendo’s 27-page court filing argues that the consumers behind the class-action lawsuit were well aware that tariffs were behind last year's price increases. “Instead, Plaintiffs ask this Court to invent a legal duty out of whole cloth to retroactively re-price completed sales simply because the legal landscape has changed,” the company says.
The lawsuit argues that the tariff situation has been unfair to customers, but Nintendo’s complaint counters, saying, “that is not how commercial transactions work," adding, "Taken to its logical extension, Plaintiffs’ theory would require every business that raises a price to recompute its prices and repay consumers if some pricing assumption proves mistaken."
In addition, the company says it absorbed some of the costs of the tariffs, including for the Nintendo Switch 2, while it “imposed modest and selective price adjustments.” The other problem is that many consumers technically paid third-party retailers, rather than Nintendo, when buying their Switch products. “Plaintiffs would have paid—and hence purportedly ‘enriched’— the retailer, not Nintendo,” the court filing says.
“If a consumer did not want to pay the advertised price, they were free to abstain from purchasing the product or seek out competing products,” the document later adds.
Nintendo also argues that one of the plaintiffs, Gregory Hoffer, can bring his complaint only through private arbitration because he agreed to Nintendo’s terms of service, which require him to “arbitrate his claims against Nintendo in lieu of bringing them in court.”
Nintendo’s court filing adds: “Although the government has initiated a refund process that allows certain importers to obtain refunds, litigation over the government’s refund obligations remains ongoing." In March, the company filed its own lawsuit, demanding the White House issue refunds, with interest.
Several other class-action lawsuits have been filed by consumers seeking tariff-related refunds from companies, including Sony.
