from the oops dept
Nintendo hates whenever it loses even a modest amount of control over its properties. Lately, Nintendo has been making a ton of noise bullying YouTubers over all kinds of uses of Zelda content, with Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom having been slated for release mid-May. The company even attempted to subpoena Discord to unmask a leaker of an unreleased Zelda artbook covering the game.
But if Nintendo managed to have a decent sized freak-out over leaked scans of an artbook for the game, imagine how it will react to the game itself leaking out early.
Physical copies that appear to have been sold ahead of the game’s May 12 release date began making the rounds over the weekend, with some of them popping up on reseller shops for hundreds of dollars. It wasn’t long before the files were dumped online and some players raced to pirate it and begin playing ahead of release, even going so far as to try to stream it on Twitch before being suspended. Others have descended on various Discord servers just to catch a glimpse of leaked footage from the pirated copies in hopes of learning more about the biggest Switch game of 2023.
Nintendo is already reacting, getting sites to pull down sales listings for the games, getting Twitch streamers suspended and videos taken down, and otherwise attempting to DMCA all of this to hell. It won’t really work. The leak is out and you cannot put that particular genie back in the bottle. Anyone out there that has streamed any footage of the leaked game, or pirated it, can expect to be in Nintendo’s crosshairs, which is to be expected.
But here is where Nintendo’s draconian and largely anti-fan behavior comes rearing its ugly head. While Nintendo undoubtedly has its fans, it also has done little to ingratiate itself to the public generally. Through its staunch policy of obliterating anything that fans create, the end result is that there are plenty of people on social media and elsewhere cheering on this leak. And this is becoming a regular occurrence for Nintendo properties.
Tears of the Kingdom leaking early shouldn’t come as a surprise though. Despite Nintendo’s beset efforts, the same thing happened with the Wii U version of Breath of the Wild in 2017, and Pokémon leaks keep happening earlier and earlier as well.
Were there more loyalty from the fanbase generally, perhaps we would see more people coming out negatively about the leak and any pirated content. But that would require Nintendo treating its customers in a human and awesome way, rather than as meat-sack machines designed to spit dollars directly into the company’s coffers.
So, yeah, a leak like this, and pirating Nintendo content, certainly sucks. But so does Nintendo’s reaction to this sort of thing.
