Nothing is stored to tie carts to hardware or accounts.
Do you remember the discontinued gold points program? For any brand new physical cartridge you could claim equivalent to 1% the game’s price. Obviously the points could only be claimed once, by a single account. This seems to point pretty strongly to carts being uniquely identifiable and to Nintendo’s ability of keeping track of usage.
Do you remember the discontinued gold points program? For any brand new physical cartridge you could claim equivalent to 1% the game’s price. Obviously the points could only be claimed once, by a single account. This seems to point pretty strongly to carts being uniquely identifiable and to Nintendo’s ability of keeping track of usage.
They used a code-in-box for that on physical releases, IIRC. The carts are identifiable, but they´re not tied to an account, that I know of.
I recalled differently so I looked it up. Here’s a video of a random person claiming their points. No code-in-box, just the console phoning Nintendo with cartridge inserted.