You may recall that, last month, there was a Reddit leak involving a GameStop employee. The employee had leaked the new Nintendo Switch OLED model that is themed on The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Nintendo has since announced the new Switch model, confirming the leak.
However, things did not end well for the GameStop employee. Not only has GameStop discovered who did it, an individual that spoke to Kotaku as “Mike”, but GameStop had fired the employee a couple of weeks after Nintendo officially announced the new Switch model.
As for why GameStop fired him, it isn’t surprising. Mike, as well as another GameStop employee that worked at the store and heard the same thing, both stated that the manager had told them “off the record” that Nintendo gave him no choice and demanded that the employee be fired. According to Mike, when his manager told him the bad news of his firing, he said that “this is your favorite company and now they hate you”.
I’d say it’s kind of an honor to be personally fired by Nintendo themselves.
Live and learn. There was zero reason for him to take a picture of it and share it online. I’m sure he’s had to sign some sort of confidentiality agreement at some point working at Gamestop so… shouldn’t have been a surprise to get fired.
While you work at a Pacific company like Nintendo, Ubisoft or SEGA you have to sign a confidentiality agreement to make sure you don’t leak any details of the companies future projects or products. It means you agree with the company policy by obeying it by not running your mouth towards people and not ruining the surprise for others who didn’t got the products before it gets officially release. Everyone has to sign for it and agree to it.
I mean, I’m kinda glad that he did leak it. I wouldn’t have known about it if he hadn’t, and I doubt I would have gotten a preorder in if I hadn’t already been wanting it for months
Fudge around and find out is what he learned, the hard way.
Too harsh I think they could deduct a month salary or something.
too hard to be fired but you want him to work a month of his life for free to make up for it?
Honestly, he knew the consequences is coming for him and he knew the result of his actions for leaking unreleased products from Nintendo. I’m sure this part will be the result of streamers and gamers show some respect and compassion of most of Nintendo’s policy. It’s called discipline.
Why should gamestop even care? It created a demand.
Gamestop cares because, if they refused, Nintendo could have revoked their license to sell Nintendo products. Breaking the confidentiality agreements between them and any major publisher is essentially a death knell to any vendor.
They’d never do that because if they lose gamestop they shoot their own foot off.
The employee probably did it for his 2 minutes of fame and probably a sub or follow on social media, i do the same thing and leak information online. They probably did it to be internet famous, like all hipsters.
“this is your favorite company and now they hate you”.
They won’t remember him after a year or two with the amount of people that enjoy getting swatted by the ninjas.
Never mess with Nintendo with stuff like this.
Not surprising, that’s what happens when you leak for the sake of clout chasing without stopping to think about covering your tracks. You always needs to operate with as much anonymity as possible when talking about sensitive information like this. Specifying your place of employment is a real easy way to paint a target on your back.
Capitalism sucks, the corporations own you etc. This leak didn’t cost Nintendo a penny but they still look to ruin someone’s life over it. Moving on from the obvious though:
““I wasn’t really trying to cover my tracks because I didn’t know it would lead to this,” Mike told Kotaku.” – this is outrageously naive. He honestly thought he could just leak this stuff and no one would care? Nintendo and Zelda is the worst combo as well, because Nintendo are super-protective of Zelda stuff (you should notice that leaks of Zelda games are significantly more rare than say leaks of Fire Emblem or Metroid games).
I can only assume Mike is young. A hard lesson learned, I hope he bounces back from this. And leakers – if your job has value to you, it just really isn’t worth it. Nintendo are going to pursue you – and as we saw with the Star Fox Grand Prix a few years ago, they’ll literally go to the extent of faking games if that means they can catch leakers. They’re certainly going to do the basic stuff like a Google on your Reddit username for example. Leaking stuff gives you only a very small amount of online clout, it’s just not even close to being worth your job.
Don’t make me laugh. Favorite company? Maybe I should choose a favorite tumor while I’m at it.
Oh no! I got fired as retail staff at Gamestop! Whatsoever shall I do now! T_T
Serves them right leakers ruin alot