With less than two weeks to go until the release of the hotly-anticipated Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, it would appear that a number of super-lucky fans have managed to get hold of the game early. Nintendo isn’t actually too bothered about this. It considers ‘no publicity to be bad publicity’ and has allowed the subsequent YouTube videos to remain, hoping that they will help to stoke the flames of excitement in the build-up to this winter’s must-have title.

I am of course lying – apart from the bit about the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate leak; that part is true 😉 Apparently, this all came about because some cheeky stores in Mexico broke the street date and started offering the title to keen smashers. (The game isn’t due out until December 7th. Order it here #plug #plug)

 

Inevitably, this led to a number of enthusiastic gamers taking their findings to the font-of-all-video-knowledge that is YouTube, leaking many (if not all) of the game’s key features including, well, the storyline, and various soundtrack samples.

And if there’s one thing that gamers and YouTubers have learnt over the last few years, it’s that You Don’t Mess with Nintendo. The website Comicbook is reporting that several streams have been obliterated from existence, and copyright claims have been dutifully deployed. Moreover, two popular YouTubers (Crunchii and Dystifyzer) have had their channels shut down in apparent perpetuity, leaving many hundreds of thousands of subscribers cast out into the Abyss.

And when it comes to the morality of all this? Yowwww I dunno. Well first off, those vendors in Mexico shouldn’t have broken the street date (nay, naughty) and you can hardly blame the consumers for buying, right? And as for those gamers who uploaded the copyrighted content to YouTube, they must have known they were taking a risk, so it can’t have been the biggest surprise in the world when there were repercussions. But – in my opinion – it is a disproportionate reaction for Nintendo to have a YouTube channel permanently shut down. I don’t believe it will incentivise people to refrain from leaking – I just think it will make Nintendo look slightly cruel. Like, if your child steals something, there’s a biiiiig difference between taking their favourite toy off them and smashing it with a hammer. Non?

 

Anyway, how do you all feel about this whole situation? Were the YouTubers wrong to share their findings with the world wide web? And was Nintendo wrong to react in the way that it did? Let’s get the moral debate started in the comments below.

And unless your local game supplier is in Mexico, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate will be available on the Nintendo Switch from Friday 7th December 🙂