Bad news for impatient Nintendo gamers: leaker Pyoro has left social networks after being trapped. However, the Kyoto-based company can congratulate itself on this feat. It has now been a year since the Internet user with the characteristic profile picture revealed a number of surprises before the manufacturer’s presentations. Making a series of correct predictions, Pyoro quickly built a community of loyal followers in search of early revelations. Last week’s Nintendo Direct therefore promised to be the prey of choice for the leaker. Not surprisingly, the absence of statements from him in the week leading up to the presentation did not go unnoticed.
“Don’t expect too much,” he said on X (formerly Twitter) the day before the conference. No major leaks this time around, followers had to make do with an emoji riddle and information about Metal Slug and Ace Attorney Investigations. But Pyoro’s warning about content coming eventually worked against him. By unveiling new titles from cult franchises such as Mario & Luigi, Zelda and even Metroid, Nintendo has managed to protect its main announcements. This failure on the part of the leaker has not failed to raise suspicions about the source of his information. It was then that users of the ResetEra forum were able to identify a recurring pattern in his predictions: a discovery that began his precipitous fall.
The theory launched by a user named “dgamemaster” did not fail to blow up the powder keg. Noting that only the Metal Slug and Ace Attorney web pages were put online shortly after their unveiling, the user judged that Pyoro was getting his information from the “backend” of Nintendo’s official website, which his source certainly had access to. A deeper investigation later revealed that all of the past leaks were indeed related to games whose web pages appeared in parallel to a Nintendo Direct.
It only took a short time for the leaker to reveal everything. When asked by Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier via a private message about X, Pyoro confessed that his source works for Nintendo in Japan, but that he doesn’t know “how they get their information” before adding that “the backend theory is a reasonable guess.” This information revealed by Schreier took the leaker by surprise, who seemed convinced of the journalist’s discretion. “WTF, I didn’t think he would include my answers in his report,” reads a now-deleted tweet.
The absence of anticipated web pages for the latest major announcements suggests that Nintendo has managed to understand and anticipate the leaker’s method.
