Unfortunately, it seems that Nintendo is now completely helpless to leaks. So many first-party games over the last couple of years have found their way online—either streamed, copied and played on PC—a week or more before release. Along with them, Pokémon Scarlet and Violet have already seen a huge number of leaks over the past few days, but as of this writing, the entire game is being streamed live to an audience of over a thousand. Nintendo has been trying to put out fires all week as more and more information about Scarlet and Violet has surfaced online, including spoilers about how the trio of new starters will turn out. Thanks to the need to ship physical copies to stores (both online and brick-n-mortar) before release, media ne’er-do-wells get their hands on the game in advance and then grab for a moment of spoiler internet fame. But now things have gotten much worse, with a multi-hour stream of someone playing the entire game. Look, it’s up to you, and obviously you can go watch it on Trovo (Tencent’s eerily familiar version of Twitch), but I really wouldn’t. I did this to verify this story, and I had already seen the post-evolution of a starter I really didn’t want to know about, and I saw a whole host of new (but not officially revealed) Pokémon. These are all surprises that I will no longer have when my copy arrives on the 18th. Read More: Pokémon Scarlet And Violet Leak Shows New Monsters, Including An Initial Evolution Honestly, seeing how Quaxly—or Sergeant Duck to give him his proper name—develops has put me off the starter I was planning to play with. This is crap. And yes, I can confirm that those earlier leaks based on some tiny pixel images of the Pokédex are accurate. G/O Media may receive a commission Almost 12 hours into this stream, whoever the deeply obnoxious name “reeeetardkun” is must surely be getting tired. But not before, almost every secret from the game has found its way out there. I am not mentioning them here, although God knows it will be difficult for all of us to avoid any kind of secrets during the next seven days. It’s worth noting that I also saw the game unfold completely in the stream, where each location became just a white screen but for pop-up information. Stopping and reloading fixed it, but yeah, that doesn’t bode well. However, Nintendo has announced that the game is getting a 1GB patch, so maybe such issues will be removed with release? Apparently Trovo is being used for this because Nintendo would have had contacts on Twitch to shut it down hours ago. With 11 hours of gameplay out there now, managing to wipe it out will be pretty futile. And, you know, perspective, it’s a video game: It’s too bad for Nintendo, but we just have to look away. And as much as I’d like to get an idea of a lot of new Pokémon, I’d rather have a few surprises in a week.
