“Echoes of Wisdom” leaked online

It’s becoming a pretty consistent pattern: Nintendo releases a first-party title for the Switch in a few weeks, then it’s revealed that copies of the game have already leaked online. This happened again with September 26th The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom –a ROM of the game apparently first appeared on Fridayand now Nintendo is struggling with the crisis as unofficial footage of the game is appearing all over the internet.

2023 saw catastrophic leaks for Nintendo, including Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom And Super Mario Bros. Wonder. The year before, Pokémon Scarlet And Violet on the Internet fourteen days before its release date, before that it was Metroid Horror And Pokémon Brilliant Diamond And Shiny Pearl. So it is perhaps not surprising that the biggest Nintendo title of 2024, Echoes of Wisdomshould suffer the same fate – but no less annoying for a company that is in the middle of a Blitzkrieg against Emulators And ROM Hosting Sites.

This year there was also the bizarre phenomenon by Nintendo, which apparently causes stores like Walmart to cancel pre-orders of their first-party games, such as Paper Mario: The Gate to Eternity. This, although unexplained, was presumably an attempt to plug the leaks where physical copies of a game are sent to stores days or weeks before the release date so that shelves are stocked by midnight and orders shipped to customers arrive at their homes on day one. But of course, this also provides an opportunity for employees to get a copy, create a ROM and pirate the game. Last year GameStop fired an employee for doing just that with Tears of the Kingdom.

Read more: New Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom Trailer reveals that there is a whole second world

This problem is compounded by another aspect unique to the Switch: it is a current-generation console that can be easily emulated on PC. Emulators are usually about two console generations behind, and there is currently little sign of stable, working PS4 or Xbox One emulation, and 360 emulation is not GreatBut the Switch was already relatively old technology when it released in 2017, which meant emulators appeared almost immediately, and seven years later they’re now capable of running Switch games at far higher resolutions and frame rates than the Nintendo console itself. This means that leaked ROMs don’t come from piracy carts like they did with the Nintendo DS, but are easily acquired PC games, making it ridiculously easy to upload footage online.

For this reason, Nintendo is currently sending out a flood of warnings for videos appearing on YouTube showing the first Zelda games. Zelda ten days before the game goes 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 meant a lost sale (companies like to suggest this), that would be an eight-figure loss. The game had over 20 million copies by February 2024, which corresponds to a ten-digit profit.

The problem that affects players even more is the boredom of avoiding spoilers in the following two weeks, and we are now in that situation with Echoes of Wisdom. Nintendo has very carefully drop by drop how complex and clever this game is going to be, and the released game will almost certainly have many more surprises in it. However, if you stumble upon the wrong YouTube video, there will be no more surprises, and that’s annoying.

So you have been warned. Go to your spoiler bunker for the next ten days.

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