 Before we get into today's video, I want to remind you that we are on a road to 100,000 subscribers and if we can get there by the time Tears of the Kingdom comes out on May 12th, we will be giving away a collector's edition of Tears of the Kingdom, so that's Steelbook, the artbook, the pins, and that poster, it can be all yours for free, we just need to see if we can get to our goal, so I would appreciate if you would go ahead and subscribe to the channel. Now, today we're going to be talking about Tears of the Kingdom because I'm a little confused and I bet I'm not the only person that's confused because as of today, we're essentially two days away from being two months out from the game coming out. And before I go further in, I'm going to ask you to go down to the comment section and tell me what is the first thing you hope to do in Tears of the Kingdom when you boot it up? Just anything, whatever it is, maybe you want to go hit a tree and grab a stick, I have no idea, but what's the first thing you want to try to do? Now, the reason I find this to be really strange is we thought the marketing campaign was supposed to begin last month, right? That's what we all were believing, that Nintendo was waiting for the infamous February Nintendo Direct to give us some sort of blowout or at least some sort of example from the game. And by the way, we did get a trailer, in fact arguably one of the best trailers today. We heard Ganondorf's voice, we saw Evil of Foot, we heard Doubt from Zelda, that link is actually going to be able to win this time. We got a lot of really cool stuff, we even got potentially a tease at weapon grafting, at least some weird things going on with weapon grafting. Also, vehicles and that's wild and that's crazy and that's awesome. But what we didn't get afterwards is a continuous marketing campaign. Now obviously back then, they still had some other games to worry about marketing. We had Kirby return to Dreamland Deluxe which, hey, shout out to Kirby. Hey, Kirby's still number one in Japan. It's right there at the top of the chart, so while PlayStation 5 is the best selling system, Kirby is the best selling game at the moment. So, shout out to Kirby, getting some Japanese love over there. But here's the thing, besides that, there hasn't been a whole lot for Nintendo to worry about. Optimum Traveler 2 came out, it's a multi-platform game. Obviously, we still have the Bayonetta stuff that's supposed to be coming this month and that's cool. But also, they haven't really ramped up the marketing for Tears of the Kingdom at all. We thought that this was the beginning. In fact, they gave us a slight tease right after the direct. They gave us a bunch of screenshots and then over the next 24 hours, they gave us a bunch of official art. So it felt like, alright, now's the time. We're going to start getting random screenshots dropped, or if not daily, at least weekly, maybe some commercial teases. Oh, here's a new 32nd commercial in Japan. Here's a new 32nd commercial in the UK. Oh, here's another small trailer. Here's an article detailing the about us with a new link or some changes that happened to Zelda. And then eventually, this could all lead to us finally getting a story trailer or some sort of Zelda Direct. We could have the announcement of a brand new Tears of the Kingdom Special Edition system and all these other things. Like, oh, we're going to start getting merchandise advertising. Hey, we got Upcoming Address, the amiibo we announced. But you know what? Now we got a partnership of first four figures to have these things launching alongside of the game. Maybe we get some new Zelda LEGO sets. And look, we thought it was going to begin. And yet, we're basically two months out from the game coming out, and it didn't. We thought we were just waiting for that Direct. And now we're still waiting. Why? I know that Nintendo at times can be an extremely secretive company with very specific games. We also know nothing about Metroid Prime 4, right? Like, they could be a very secretive company with very specific games. But Zelda has never been that game where Nintendo doesn't heavily market it having the launch. Look, Breath of the Wild obviously had its own extremely unique marketing campaign. And I certainly did not expect Tears of the Kingdom to mimic that marketing campaign. They were launching an entirely new system. But was it so off base to expect a similar marketing campaign as The Wind Waker got? How about a similar marketing campaign to Majora's Mask? Heck, we were getting commercials for that game four months out from launch. Remember that moon falling commercial? Yeah, that was four months out. What is going on with Tears of the Kingdom? Why are they afraid to market this game? Now, I use fear in a bit of a tongue-in-cheek way. I don't think Nintendo is afraid of anything. I do think that Nintendo is confident. Maybe over-confident. You see, I do think Tears of the Kingdom is going to be an absolutely fantastic game because Breath of the Wild was a fantastic game. They spent a long time developing this. And if the team behind Breath of the Wild made a game I love, why wouldn't Tears of the Kingdom be a game I love? But that's just me having confidence in them. I think Nintendo is over-confident in Tears of the Kingdom's ability to sell itself as simply being a sequel to Breath of the Wild. I think this is a sign of Nintendo maybe resting their marketing laurels on the fact that this is a sequel to the most popular Zelda game ever released. And we don't need to massively market the game. We don't need to open the floodgates. This is the thing I think we should start having a conversation about as we get to two months out from the game coming. Maybe the floodgates are just never going to open. Oh, do you expect a Zelda Direct later this month? What about in April? What if we don't get one at all? What if Nintendo never opens the floodgates on the marketing? And all we're going to get is a final trailer, a launch trailer, about a week out from the game coming out. What if that's it? What if that's all that's next? And that seems just stupid. Nintendo wouldn't do that. They marketed Kirby more than that. But what if they're also that confident that simply being the sequel to the best-selling Zelda game of all time is enough that it's going to sell enough? I find it strange, but I also don't know that this is wild and out of bounds because Nintendo does experiment with a lot of things. And I wonder if, tears of the kingdom, they are trying an experimental marketing campaign creating demand by giving very little information, by purposely holding back and revealing almost nothing about this game. It can create more demand, interest, and intrigue in the game at launch. Now, the thing is, it's only going to do that for people that play Breath of the Wild. It certainly won't do that for anyone who's never played a Zelda game. So I could argue that in terms of trying to sell tears of the kingdom to a brand new audience, they're doing a pretty bad job. But here we sit a couple of months out and I'm going a little mad over here, wondering why we're not seeing more of this. Now, I do think there will still be some tears of the kingdom-related announcements. As an example, the OLED, right? The Zelda OLED that at this point leaked months ago and we can all but say that at least that leak was real. It was a real leak because it had a bunch of symbols on it. We had never seen before. We thought fans maybe mocked it up based on things from prior trailers and then the collector's edition gets announced and lo and behold, those exact same symbols are present. So it turns out that, okay, that actually was a legit leak. Maybe it was just a prototype. Maybe it was a real thing. But obviously Nintendo's probably going to have a special edition OLED to launch, right? They didn't increase production of Switch OLEDs heading into next year because they're not going to do a special edition I think is going to sell really well. So yeah, I do think they will announce it. Some people think they'll announce it next week because that gives them a similar release, announce and release pattern to some prior Nintendo Switch OLEDs. Some think they'll announce it in April. Maybe they're waiting to be, like right now is Mario Day. Today is Mario Day. They dropped the DLC. They got this other stuff. The other things they wanted to distract you with, they don't want to talk Zelda. And you know what? They have a Mario movie and one prevailing theory at the moment is all their marketing is shifting to the Mario movie. Okay? Nintendo likes to not market multiple things at once. I don't know why, but that's just the way Nintendo is. They like to have a very focused marketing and right now the Mario movie is getting the marketing. We got the Mario movie direct, but more than the Mario movie direct, they're getting other marketing, the Jimmy Fallon appearances now. And look, the interviews and it's happening. The Mario movie floodgates have opened and that movie comes out in less than a month. So the last prevailing thought and we thought this back when we were waiting for the director in February is we just need the Mario movie to come out. That we're going to get a Zelda blowout the week after the Mario movie comes out because we hit exactly one month from launch on April 12th. April 12th happens to land on a Wednesday. Nintendo does do directs on Wednesday. So maybe Wednesday, April 12th will be when we finally get the big marketing push for Tears of the Kingdom. And waiting until the final month, well, frustrating for some, at least gives them a month run-up of marketing, right? Or, I mean, as most of us consider it, three weeks of run-up because we all know Tears of the Kingdom is going to leak online a week early, right? So we got about three weeks for us as consumers of relevant stuff before all of us begin to block Tears of the Kingdom on social media because we don't want the whole game ruined for us. Look, the only reason it kind of feels like we have been okay to date is because of the artbook leak. Where would we be right now if the artbook didn't leak? And I'm starting to, maybe this is just my crazy brain going, I'm starting to think the longer and longer we don't hear about this game. And now that I'm pretty convinced we won't hear about Tears of the Kingdom until after the Mario movie comes out, that that artbook leak might have been intentional by Nintendo, that they wanted to leak that artbook because they knew they had nothing else going on until after Mario. And so they wanted to just give us something to think about while we're waiting, while we're waiting, while we're waiting. I mean, I posted 50 plus pages of the artbook directly to YouTube to much of your guys' chagrin or to some of your guys' delight. And all YouTube did was say, yeah, you need to take that video down, but we're going to leave you alone. That's it, no strikes. They didn't come after my channel hard or anything. They just said, yeah, just take that down, please, thanks. Sure, I'll take it down. That's it. You're just giving me like a slap on the wrist. This is something you're selling. This is something that you're only supposed to get if you buy a $130 collector's edition and the entire thing leaked out there. And you're only going to slap me on the wrist? But there's other videos today that still on my channel alone have a couple pages of the artbook shown in it when we're talking about certain things. Granted, they're zoomed in and the whole page isn't present at one time, but there's still leaked things there. There's an entire tears of the kingdom reddit where images leaked from the artbook are popping up every day as people come up with new theories. And Nintendo's not shutting that down. I'm starting to think that artbook leak was intentional. And if the artbook leak was intentional, that just leads to this whole premise that they knew they weren't going to be talking about this game until a month out or maybe they're just not going to talk about it at all. You guys let me know how you're feeling today about two months, about two months again, or a couple days off from this strangeness that we're experiencing right now with this marketing campaign. Do you think it's a good idea? A secretly brilliant one? I know I don't need to be sold on the game. I'm buying it. But I do worry about other people that just don't know. And there's plenty of people that look at it still and can't quite figure out if it's going to be worth a $70 price tag. There's that as well. They do need to sell some of the Breath of the Wild customers on, hey, we're charging more for this game. Why? Some people still need to be sold on that, too. So I don't know. Nintendo's going to Nintendo. And I know Kit Ellis, he called it. He called that there would be a very, very weak marketing campaign for this game. But you know what? Maybe we're getting blown out starting April 12th. Maybe the art book leak was intentional. Maybe a lot of things. Let me know what you think, and I'll catch you guys in the next video.