 fake tiers of the kingdom leaks. Oh boy, we have to talk about it. No, we're not talking about the rumors that persist out there about various ongoings and aspects of the game and Reddit posts that are trying to tell us tidbits about the story or the gameplay. Sure, a lot of that stuff is probably fake, but that's the obvious stuff and when we and others talk about it, it's usually just for fun, not necessarily because we believe those things to be true, hence why they get labeled as rumors and that's that. But what's been happening over the last 24 to 48 hours has been causing a widespread panic across many social online platforms. And that is because there is misinformation being spread at a rapid pace that needs to be better understood and needs to be put in the right context. And I'm going to explain that context after I remind you that we are currently giving away a tiers of the kingdom Nintendo Switch OLED, a special edition of tiers of the kingdom and a exclusive pin from PAX East. If you would like to get your hands on any of this stuff, the giveaway links are down in the pinned comment or the description. We're also on the road to 133,000 subscribers. I'd appreciate if you help us get there. And let's talk about what this is. So the number one thing that we're waiting for at this point when we're about 20 days out from launch is the big kahuna, right? Not just the game releasing, the game getting released early unintentionally. So what am I talking about? Well, every single Nintendo Switch game leaks, all of them. And we're not talking about the Pokemon Scarlet leaks that were going on since summer last year, we're talking about Pokemon Scarlet, the entire video game just appeared online and was being datamined and played by people with hacked switches and emulators. We're talking about games releasing early online. And this happens for a variety of reasons, mostly because hacked switches exist before hacked switches were a thing. This wasn't a problem. But since hacked switches are a thing, it's become a pretty rapid problem. In fact, I could argue whenever Nintendo moves on to Nintendo Switch 2, if we don't get cross-platform games for a while, one of the big reasons could be because Nintendo is tired of leaks and the old platform is going to give you leaks because there's millions and millions of hacked Nintendo switches out there. Whereas there won't be any hacked new devices, meaning that games weren't released early. But that's neither here nor there. That's a conversation we could have maybe whenever Nintendo does announce the next platform and tells us about backwards compatibility and if we're going to have cross-platform games, we're going to have that conversation then. This conversation is actually about people pretending that Tears of the Kingdom has leaked now. There are a number of images going out there. Some of them are obvious fakes because they show Tears of the Kingdom on the Nintendo Switch home screen alongside things like God of War Ragnarok. Clearly, that's fake, right? God of War Ragnarok is in a Switch game. But we're also seeing things like this particular screenshot being shared where it shows what looks like a totally plausible physical copy of Tears of the Kingdom on a home screen. And while you can run this through all the various different image analyzers out there, and while a lot of them will tell you it's probably fake, there's no definitive evidence that this has actually been a photoshopped image. What people need to remember is how easy it is to fake Nintendo Switch icons. Every single image featuring Tears of the Kingdom on the home screen has one thing in common. All of them, every single one, is featuring an old version one Nintendo Switch. Why does that matter? Because version one Nintendo Switches are the ones that can be hacked and if you have a hacked Switch, you can modify your home screen to put a Tears of the Kingdom icon along with it having a physical cartridge inserted along with it saying the Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom. You can modify all of it to do exactly that and go ahead and fool the internet. Now how do we know that that's what's happening here? Because you just got done telling us the game's leak every single time. So how do we know that this is fake? Well, I have been in contact in seven different countries with different retail sources who have informed me that no shipments of Tears of the Kingdom haven't even been sent. Like they're not even ordered. They're not even on the way to the stores. What does that mean? Retail outlets probably do not have physical copies of Tears of the Kingdom right now and if they don't have physical copies of Tears of the Kingdom, it's impossible for a physical copy to leak online. Boom. The only copies that could possibly be out there will be digital review copies, not physical copies. So here's the thing. We have to keep this in mind in the back of our head that it looks like retailers do not have Tears of the Kingdom right now and I've been told they don't expect Tears of the Kingdom to arrive for two weeks. Yeah, that's right. When do games typically leak for Nintendo Switch about a week before launch? Why do they leak a week before launch? Because that's when retailers get their copies to sell to the public. So yeah, that's when the leaks happen. As soon as they hit the warehouses, as soon as it's a mom and pop shop that maybe sells it to their son early or maybe it's just a store that doesn't really pay attention to release dates and the moment products come in, no matter what the product is, they just put it on the shelves for sale. Heck, we've seen stories of certain Walmart selling copies of games early because they'll put them out in the store and then they'll go up and say, hey, can I buy this? The customer knows it won't ring up and they'll try to ring it up and the employee will be like, huh, that doesn't make any sense. They'll go check the sticker price. They'll manually type in, hey, Nintendo Switch game, $59.99 and just sell it to you anyways. We've seen this happen. I've had this. I've walked into a Walmart and bought a game early through this method. So I know that this is exactly how games get leaked. A physical copy gets out there. Someone with a version one hack switch leaks it online. People data mine it. People start playing it through ROMs and emulators and on hack switches. And before you know it, people are attempting to stream the damn thing and getting taken up by Nintendo because they're being stupid and shouldn't be streaming it. It's something that happens with every single release and I just had to put out there that everything so far has been fake. I've even had people on my own discord server not going to name anyone. We're not here to attack. Come out and try to tell me I saw the game being streamed and then they got nuked by Nintendo. Yeah, I dug into that as well. I went into every single, including the dark corners of the internet and nobody has seen this game be streamed. Nobody can provide evidence of the game being streamed, whether they're clout seeking, whether it was a streamer playing a heavily modded version of Breath of the Wild passing in office, tears of the kingdom, etc, etc. It's something that I can't verify. What I can verify is that everyone that has claimed that a leaked copy of Tears of the Kingdom is out in the wild has been wrong and unverified and unprovable. So no, you don't need to turn on all your red flags and start blocking tears of the kingdom on all the social media accounts because you're afraid of seeing leaked spoiler information. It's not happening right now. You're probably clear for a couple weeks. I do have some good news though for you that are waiting for legit coverage of the game. Coverage Nintendo has encouraged and allowed because they don't think it spoils that much about the game and this is the game Nintendo is very protective of. So official coverage is something you should look forward to. I have an on good authority this upcoming week. We're probably going to end up getting media previews. There was a recent demo event that certain media members were invited to to play the game and they're going to be allowed to release their preview coverage this week. That probably means new footage. That probably means write ups, etc. about this demo. So that is something we can look forward to this week. The week after that, that's the week before launch. You get to that week and yeah, there'll probably be more previews, this previews coming from things like review copies. So you start playing the game, you're allowed to put our review, you know, prop preview either on that Friday or the following Monday, the week of launch. And then yeah, you'll drop the reviews the day before. I don't know if IGN is going to get IGN first on this thing to maybe give us a little bit more details at the very beginning of May. But the point is that nothing is out there right now. And that's really the point to this video. I've seen a number of videos and social media posts online parodying that it has leaked everyone go crazy block things and you just go on with your day. And I just want to be, you know, I look, I'm I don't have a perfect track record here I make mistakes. But when it comes to this based on who I've talked to, looking around the internet seeing how easy it is to actually fake this stuff. Guys, there is no tears of the kingdom out in the wild right now. There isn't anybody playing it who isn't supposed to be playing it. And no, it's not about to leak online and just spoil the game for everyone. Two weeks from now, different story. Right now, we're safe. So happy. Enjoy your social media. Don't believe every fake post you see out there. Call them out when you see them. If they are being mean to you, just ignore them because you know what? It's not worth really bickering and arguing about. I'm here to just make sure that all of us get to enjoy tears of the kingdom the way we want. If you're someone who wants a bunch of spoilers, hey, we'll let you know when the game leaks. We'll tell you there's a bunch of spoilers out there. And heck, if you want to go find them, I highly encourage that you take the time out of your day to go find them. For the rest of you guys that don't want to see that stuff, don't worry. We're not going to have it here. If anything at all even remotely got discussed that was spoilery, it would be heavily warned. I can't imagine that I would. I have this policy where once a game leaks, we stop talking about leak things and only talk about official media. But that's neither here nor there. You guys let me know what you think about this down in the comments below. I am Nathaniel Rumpeljantz from Nintendo Prime, and I'll catch you guys in our next video tomorrow.