GameStop Employee Who Leaked Zelda Switch Fired After Nintendo Pressure

The new Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom special edition Nintendo Switch console was initially leaked by a GameStop employee and now that employee has been fired after GameStop received pressure from Nintendo.

GameStop Employee Leaks Zelda Edition Switch

A GameStop employee from Massachusetts leaked the Zelda edition switch after seeing an “HW TBD Switch” entry in the game stop system a few hours before the Nintendo Direct broadcast that revealed the console and shared this information on Reddit. The employee, only known by Mike, shared the image so that fans could pre-order the switch in case it was difficult to find and wasn’t aware that he was breaking company policy as he never revealed any images or any information about the console. Unfortunately for Mike, he was fired 2 weeks later.

Nintendo Requests For Mike To Be Let Go

Mike was interviewed by Kotaku and after being fired he was told off the record by his former boss that Nintendo had specifically requested his termination over the leak. This whole situation to me seems a little unfair. Almost every major business will have a social media policy that forbids sharing information like this and whilst Mike should’ve rightfully received some form of punishment for violating that, the actual information he leaked was mostly meaningless and he should’ve been simply met with a warning rather than lose his job. This tiny meaningless leak hasn’t affected Nintendo as they’ve still made their sales and having this much power to cause someone to lose their job over something so small is just disgusting. If anything it’s just a minimum-wage retail job and he can find another relatively easily however I doubt he’ll be getting a good reference from GameStop.

You can read Mike’s Reddit post regarding his termination here.

What is your opinion on this? Let us know in the comments.