GameStop Employee Claims Nintendo Got Him Fired For Leaking Zelda-Edition Switch
Late last week it was reported that Nintendo had taken action against Discord and one of its users in relation to another leak surrounding its upcoming The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom game. In that instance, Nintendo is attempting to force Discord to release the identity and information of a user who created the Discord server "Tears of the Kingdom Official Discord Server," where information about an Artbook was leaked. Now, it seems the company may have also had a hand in getting a GameStop employee fired.
In March of last year, a GameStop employee posted an image of a GameStop computer screen showing the inventory database having a new Switch model on the Tears of the Kingdom subreddit, according to a recent report by Kotaku. That employee, only wanting to be known as Mike, said he speculated that it was more than likely the special edition Zelda Switch which had already been leaked months earlier. He then added that because of that post, he was fired on April 11, 2023.
Mike admitted to being the one who shared the information in a backroom meeting with supervisors. He said he was not aware that posting the information went against GameStop's social media policies. He said he was a huge fan of the game franchise and only wanted to give other fans a heads-up about the possibility of it being related to Zelda.
While nothing official links Nintendo directly to Mike's termination, the former employee says that the store manager told him "off the record" that Nintendo had pressured the company to end his time with GameStop. Another employee from the same store has corroborated Mike's account of events and indicated the same manager had said Nintendo was the main reason behind Mike's termination.
