Nintendo is trying to sue the Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom leaker via Discord

Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom collector's edition
Leaking this was not a good idea (pic: Nintendo)

The dangers of leaking Nintendo secrets has once again been made clear, as the Mario makers subpoena Discord to get the details of a leaker.

Although it always seems to come as a surprise to those that try to pirate or emulate their games, Nintendo does not respond well to people doing anything they consider illegal, and they especially don’t like leaks.

Whereas most publishers would just shrug them off as an occupational hazard Nintendo always tries to find out where a leak comes from and often sues the person responsible, as happened with a major Pokémon leak just before the pandemic.

The most recent leak was of a Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom artbook, which sounds like it would’ve revealed a lot of important secrets but actually contained very few spoilers. But that hasn’t stopped Nintendo going after the leakers anyway.

Someone using the name JustJulienOffic posted the leaked images on Reddit and then again on Discord as Julien#2743, which suggests that their real name probably is Julien and that they didn’t expect to be pursued by Nintendo.

To that end Nintendo has filed a DMCA subpoena that would force Discord to reveal who ‘Julien’ is, including their address, telephone number and email. So much for internet anonymity.

According to TorrentFreak, Nintendo thinks the Discord is the original source of the leak and that by finding out who owns the channel they can track down the leaker in the real world.

The irony of all this is that while the leaks do technically contain spoilers there was nothing very revolutionary, just images of characters and places that haven’t been seen in trailers yet and nothing that would spoil the story or give away the secrets that were revealed in the subsequent gameplay video.

The artbook in question is the 200-page one included with the Collector’s Edition of the game and those do tend to be largely spoiler free.

So if you ever wonder why there are so few leaks about Nintendo games it’s not just because they’re secretive, it’s because they’re very litigious.

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