A newly filed lawsuit against Nintendo is seeking to recoup money for gamers who were forced to pay higher prices due to President Donald Trump’s now-illegal tariffs.
On April 21, as first reported by Aftermath, two Nintendo customers from California and Washington filed a class action suit in the United States District Court’s Western District of Washington against Nintendo in an effort to collect some of the tariff refund money the Mario company is likely to get back following the Supreme Court’s ruling in February that the tariffs, which led to increased prices on consoles and loads of other consumer goods, were illegal.
In the lawsuit, filed by Gregory Hoffert and Prashant Sharan on behalf of all affected consumers, the pair’s lawyers argue that Nintendo didn’t really suffer much financial hardship due to Trump’s tariffs because, like many other companies, they just increased prices and paid the tariffs using their customers’ money. So, if Nintendo is going to get refunds from the U.S. government, the lawsuit argues that Nintendo needs to return the money to its customers instead of holding onto it.
“As a consequence of [the Supreme Court’s decision], importers who paid those tariffs—including Nintendo—became entitled to refunds of the duties they previously paid to U.S. Customs and Border Protection,” explain the plaintiffs in the lawsuits. “The economic reality of the tariff regime, however, is that importers like Nintendo did not ultimately bear all the costs of the tariffs. Instead, the importers passed the elevated costs on to consumers in the form of higher retail prices. Nintendo therefore collected the tariff costs from consumers through elevated pricing, while seeking refunds of the same tariff payments from the federal government.”
The lawsuit says that unless the court steps in to restrain Nintendo, the company will have recovered the same tariff payments “twice,” once from consumers and once from the government.
“Nintendo has made no legally binding commitment to return tariff-related overcharges to the consumers who actually paid them,” says the gamers’ legal team in the suit. “This lawsuit seeks to prevent that unjust result.”
You might remember last month that many companies, including Nintendo, sued the federal government after the Supreme Court ruled that President Trump’s 2025 tariffs against nearly every major nation on the planet were illegal. Nintendo has paused that lawsuit for now as it waits to go through the U.S. government’s refund process and website, which weren’t yet set up when it began planning its lawsuit.
