It’s becoming a pretty set pattern at this point: Nintendo has a first-party big-name Switch title due out in a couple of weeks, then news breaks that copies of the game have already leaked online. It’s happened yet again with September 26’s The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom—a ROM of the game apparently first showing up Friday, and now Nintendo is fighting fires as unofficial footage of the game springs up all over the internet.
2023 saw disastrous leaks for Nintendo, including Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Super Mario Bros. Wonder. The year before had Pokémon Scarlet and Violet on the internet a fortnight before its street date, before that it was Metroid Dread and Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl. So perhaps it’s not surprising that 2024’s biggest Nintendo title, Echoes of Wisdom, should meet the same fate—but no less infuriating for a company that is in the midst of a blitzkrieg against emulators and ROM-hosting sites.
This year has also seen the bizarre phenomenon of Nintendo apparently causing stores like Walmart to cancel people’s pre-orders of their first-party games, like Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. While unexplained, this was presumably an effort to plug the leaks where physical copies of a game are sent to stores days or weeks in advance of street date, so that shelves can be stocked for midnight, and orders sent out to customers can arrive at their homes day one. But obviously this also creates an opportunity for staff to get hold of a copy, create a ROM, and pirate the game. Last year, GameStop fired an employee for doing exactly that with Tears of the Kingdom.
Read More: New Zelda: Echoes Of Wisdom Trailer Reveals It Has A Whole Second World
This is a problem that’s exacerbated by another aspect unique to the Switch: it’s a current-gen console that’s easily emulated on PC. Emulators are usually about two console generations behind, and there’s currently little sign of stable, working PS4 or Xbox One emus, and 360 emulation isn’t going great. But the Switch was relatively old tech even on its 2017 release, which meant emulators appeared almost straight away, and seven years later they’re now capable of running Switch games at far higher resolutions and framerates than the Nintendo console itself. This means leaked ROMs aren’t the purvey of piracy carts as was the case with the Nintendo DS, but instead are easily captured PC games, making it ludicrously simple to upload footage online.
Thus, Nintendo is now issuing a flurry of takedown notifications on videos that are appearing on YouTube, showing the first Zelda-led Zelda game being played ten days ahead of the game going on sale.
The severity of such a situation is often in the eye of the beholder. Nintendo claims that TotK was pirated one million times in court cases related to the matter. If every pirated copy represented a lost sale (companies like to imply they do), that would be an eight-figure loss. The game had sold over 20 million copies by February 2024, representing a ten-figure gain.
The issue that more significantly effects the players is the tedium of dodging spoilers for the following two weeks, and we’re now in that position with Echoes of Wisdom. Nintendo has very carefully drip-fed us the extent of just how intricate and clever this game’s going to be, and the released game is almost certainly going to be packed with far more surprises. However, if you should stumble on the wrong YouTube video, surprises they will no longer be, and that sucks.
So, you’re amply warned. Enter your spoiler bunker for the next ten days.
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