Nintendo Direct presentations always have an air of excitement around them, and the most recent Direct in particular had a bittersweet feeling to it being most likely the final Direct for the Nintendo Switch. Gamers were not really anticipating much in the way of new titles, but were surprised by a bevy of 1st party announcements, remasters, and 3rd party support leading into the holiday period. People were closely watching the usual suspects who previously leaked these announcements, but they were nowhere to be seen, preoccupied in the weeks leading up to the Nintendo Direct with drama, plot twists, shocking reveals, and surprisingly… silence.
In recent times, Leakers have attained an almost pseudo-celebrity status, with hundreds of thousands of followers, and even established a parasocial relationship with followers, garnering praise and an almost legendary status come news time. Last month, one such leaker by the name of Midori slowly unraveled in spectacular fashion. Midori arrived on the scene starting with Persona leaks, claiming to be a Japanese woman who spoke broken English who may or may not have been associated with SEGA and Atlus. Midori was so popular that many men were asking her out, forcing her to make a statement about her having a boyfriend to fend off love-lorn gamers. During Summer Games Fest cracks began to show by saying that they were strongly thinking about leaving the world of information leaks behind. As Midori’s tweets seemed to get more urgent about leaving it all behind, information came to light that Midori was not a Japanese woman, but an American man who used to be a leaker under the moniker of “Mystic Distance.” Twitter blew up and Midori faded away into obscurity, leaving one prominent leaker behind…
The most infamous leaker of all, seemingly untouchable, was Pyoro, represented by the red bird of the same name from the WarioWare Series, who had many accurate leaks in the past, had been surprisingly quiet up until the day of the direct, leaking 4 icons, which would later be Mario Party Jamboree. The usual hype began with people speculating on what these leaks could be, and Pyoro would chime in to tease that “people hadn’t guessed it yet” and “manage expectations” while also acknowledging that followers shouldn’t expect much in terms of 1st party news from Nintendo themselves. Naturally, many people’s hopes were dashed, many exclaiming that this Direct would be a waste of time… How wrong they were. Pyoro then uncharacteristically started grasping at straws, claiming that there was a 2D Zelda remake “not from his usual source” another prediction that was wrong. It started becoming apparent that Pyoro had no idea what was coming, more importantly, why he was blindsided would become apparent later.
Several users from the Forum “Reset Era” led by user “dgamemaster” noticed why Pyoro knew nothing, and that was due to Nintendo changing approach by not having pre-built product webpages ready to go when games were announced on the Direct. The ResetEra users took one sniff of this lead and began digging, correlating that previous leaks were in fact tied to these websites, deducing that either Pyoro worked on the web team, or his contact did. This caught the eye of investigative journalist Jason Schreier, a veteran in the games industry and author of the book “Press Reset: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry.”
Schreier messaged Pyoro asking him if the theory about the web backend is plausible and Pyoro surprisingly told Schreier that his source indeed works for Nintendo Japan and stated “I’m unsure how they obtain their information but the backend theory is a reasonable guess.” Single-handedly throwing himself and his contact under the bus. As you can imagine, things fell apart rather quickly from there, but not before Pyoro tweeted “WTF I didn’t know they would use my responses in their report” before locking their Twitter account down, and subsequently deleting their posts. At the time of writing, Pyoro’s account is locked and has had all interactions deleted back until December 2022, with the exception of a profile picture update. It seems Pyoro has gone to ground, and most likely will do everything they can to cover their tracks.
Is Pyoro a hero or villain in the grand scheme of things? While larger corporations like Nintendo have contingency plans in place and legal teams at the ready, it’s a different story entirely for Indie devs. I reached out to Robby Bisschop at Pirate PR, a specialist PR firm that has handled many indie game launches to find out the impact that embargo breaks have on smaller developers. When asked what the impact is on the teams behind the announcements Bisschop said “It’s demoralising. Indie games usually only have a few big beats to communicate about where they actually have some budget to spend on press releases or announcing a trailer for example. If someone gets in front of them with that info, without all the context and associated Call To Actions the dev had planned, it can really hurt the release of a game. Especially if there were exclusivity deals in the works, like IGN getting to share the trailer before any else does. Overall it’s a very shitty thing to do intentionally. It could wreck the entire communication plan of a game’s release.” Bisschop continued to highlight the financial implications this could have for devs “Not hitting the marketing beats when we intended to can definitely hurt. Imagine someone uploaded a full video playthrough of the game, weeks before the release and it’s a single-player narrative game: the fans of the title could be tempted to watch the entire video instead of waiting to buy and play, and it’s possible to lose some sales to this. On the other hand, we tend to be lenient on video embargo’s and usually give creators free control over when they can publish and what to include. It works best, but there is indeed the risk of showing too much too early.”
Not everyone sees it this way, as I asked a small group of consumers what they thought of the Nintendo Direct and the leaks that happened beforehand. One gamer had this to say: “I was hyped leading into the Direct trying to solve the emoji leak. I sat on Twitter refreshing and scrolling through comments. It builds excitement!” When asked if leaks are bad for the industry, another gamer commented “They don’t get to control their own hype/narrative, but it also gets people talking. Also free market insights… They may be able to adjust some scope depending.”
Whichever side of the fence your opinion may sit on, one thing is clear, it’s game over for the current leading leakers. Reputations are in tatters, accounts are locked down, and no doubt Nintendo is investigating these claims which will be making leakers start to sweat. The most recent Nintendo Direct blew expectations out of the water with the element of surprise, exciting gamers for the end of the Switch’s life cycle. Here’s hoping when the Switch’s successor is officially announced, it will have that same excitement and anticipation, and like any good game story, remain spoiler-free.
