Google employees continue to leak Nintendo news

Nintendo has responded to the recent leaks, claiming they are working on improving security to avoid further incidents.

Nintendo has always been pretty tight-lipped when it comes to its games and consoles. It’s difficult to find any information about soon-to-be-released titles and secret projects. This all changed when a Google employee accessed private videos in Nintendo’s YouTube account and leaked information.

At an annual shareholder meeting this week, Nintendo directors announced that they were “aware of recent leaks” and are now looking into ways to diagnose security leaks and keep employees educated on IT security.

Google leaks include Nintendo announcements

In the past, a Google contractor has since admitted to using admin privileges to not only access private information from Nintendo’s YouTube account backend, but leaking the information on Reddit and beyond. This included the reveal of an upcoming Yoshi game in 2017 and later Yoshi’s Crafted World in 2019.

On June 13, 2017, an anonymous Reddit user posted: “New Yoshi game (probably Woolly World 2) is going to be announced for Switch.” The post included a screenshot of a thumbnail for an upcoming YouTube video titled “Yoshi for Nintendo Switch – Official Game Trailer – Nintendo E3 2017.”

In that Reddit post, the person admitted that it was from a Google employee that purposefully leaked the private information. Apparently their friend worked at Google and sent it to the Reddit user.

“A Google employee apparently accessed private videos in Nintendo’s YouTube account yesterday, leaking the information to the Internet well ahead of Nintendo’s public E3 announcement,” 404 media wrote in a follow-up report.

While this is old, it appears to still be an issue within Nintendo and is happening to this day. Journalist Tom Henderson recently stated last month that investigations were continuing. Many speculated in return that other leaks were also from similar circumstances, including the GTA 6 videos.

From what I can gather, YouTube has investigated employees breaching their contractual agreements on two different occasions in the past 18 months due to employees accessing content on the backend.

Following today (and presumably SGF), we'll see a third investigation fairly…

— Tom Henderson (@_Tom_Henderson_) May 30, 2024

At finding out that Nintendo was planning to keep working on avoiding these kind of leaks, many in the fandom voiced approval.

“Good. I hate leak culture so much. It was fun when I was back in high school, but now that I’m busy I prefer the surprise of new announcements,” one fan wrote.

Added another: “You said it, man. The leaks were fun back in high school, but now that I’m in college and rather occupied, I need some shock value in my life.”

For now, Nintendo fans are advising each other to avoid leaks by muting certain people and threads or not watching videos that seem to have that kind of information within them.