Nintendo
For fans who are waiting for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom to release on May 12th, it’s time to activate spoiler mode early. Just this past weekend, the highly anticipated sequel to Breath of the Wild suffered a serious leak. Some people peddled physical game cards at prices as high as US$300 on trading websites, and later the files in the cartridges were also extracted and posted on pirated websites.
How this all happened is unknown at the moment, but according to user discussions on Reddit, someone who received the physical game ahead of time posted sporadic images first. Afterwards, someone exported the game from the cassette to the computer, and started to play it through the Switch emulator on the computer and broadcast it live through Discord. The administrator of the Discord server finally confirmed that the relevant files were also uploaded to the sharing website.
Nintendo has yet to make any comment on the matter, but it is believed that they should take legal action after identifying the leaker. In fact, the court has recently issued a subpoena to Discord based on Lao Ren’s application, requesting it to provide the personal information of users who leaked the original “Tears of the Kingdom” earlier this year.