New ‘Zelda’ Game Leaks Early, Possibly By Nintendo’s Retail Partners
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.
Comments on “New ‘Zelda’ Game Leaks Early, Possibly By Nintendo’s Retail Partners”
There's an old saying...
If you’re holding a stick of butter, don’t squeeze too tightly.
Nintendo, Netflix, cable companies and a slew of others don’t understand this principle at all. (Musk, however, continues to flounder disastrously, as should be expected from someone who got boxed into making a purchase they never really intended to make.)
A month or two ago I read an article about how baseball has finally been perfected, and that ruined it. I keep thinking about that principle, and I’m finding it to be more and more profound by the week. Congress keeps trying to “perfect” the internet, Netflix, and Nintendo, et al try to perfect their profit growth within a specific business model, Disney (obviously), and even the NFL are all trying to perfect their business models, all within a tight business plan, no innovation at all.
Apple was wonderful, until they perfected their business plan, then it began sucking. Bell Labs was never about perfection, and neither was Xerox PARC. Look who gave us more, the innovators or the perfectionists.
The real anti fan behaviour in this particular case are the idiots leaking a highly anticipated game weeks before ruining the “it’s finally here” moment of anticipation when the game does release that fans feel for a new game, not to mention the potential for inadvertent exposure to spoilers in discussion forums or social media which are hard to avoid thanks to how algorithms work.
I have no sympathy for anyone getting suspended for streaming it early etc either. They know what Nintendo are like at this point and they still do it so let the lay in the bed they’ve made. We can complain about copyright law all we want (and I do) but actions like this aren’t going to change Nintendo, it will just make them and other companies double down on DMCA activities and always on DRM.
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I very much disagree. I think Nintendo needs a hard kick in the ass for the abuse of their player base using the law against them. It’s about time Nintendo realized that their assholery won’t be tolerated. If these leaks keep happening, that suggests that they either got hacked, or they don’t exactly treat their employees as they’d like to be treated, and leaking is a way of getting revenge. At least, that’s one interpretation. Maybe if this happens enough Nintendo will realize that maybe treating their players more respectably and like they’re actual human beings might earn them some respect from their fans, and players wouldn’t be so quick to take advantage of Nintendo’s fuckups.
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What, the retailers?
They really should be not dealing with Nintendo. After all, this is the company that used to withhold stock to retailers for simply wanting to stock non-Nintendo games, and you can’t blame that one lawsuit for that.
Pirating dont suck. What really sucks is Copyright. Copyright is evil. Any resistance to the oppression that Copyright brings is good. No sympathy for ruthless exploiters of captive markets that Copyright create. Cry me a little river that Nintendo fails to extract maximum monopoly rents.
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sometimes a leak is simply marketing
This leak will only make nintendo delay physical releases and only do pre releases as digital only
Tomorrow’s headline: Nintendo sends the Pinkertons after Zelda fans
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Nintendo would probably use something worse than Pinkertons.
Would they have Disney’s legal team on speed-dial? 🤔
Ninty be trippin’!
I’m still buying the game day 1 tho.