Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has leaked on piracy sites, and Nintendo's now in a whack-a-mole war with streamers

pcgamer.com:

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is in the wild.

Over the weekend, physical copies of Tears of the Kingdom appear to have gotten into the hands of buyers a full two weeks ahead of the planned May 12 release date. Photos of the Collector's Edition appeared on 4chan, while at least two copies of the game popped up on online marketplace Mercari. The leak has now escalated to streams across Twitch, Discord and smaller streaming sites, as early players share brief looks at the game before their streams are abruptly taken offline.

PC Gamer has identified what appear to be pirated copies of Tears of the Kingdom on multiple torrent sites by following links from 4chan, shared in a file format consistent with Switch cartridge rips. We can't confirm that those files are genuine—but given the proliferation of streams, it's almost certain that the game is already being distributed illegally. There is also at least one archive of Tears of the Kingdom's pre-rendered cutscenes being linked around, though in .webm format with no audio.

That archive will likely be taken offline by a Nintendo copyright strike before long. So far, streams seem to only be online for a matter of minutes on Kick and Trovo, often using the joke title «playing Horizon»—a callback to Sony's Horizon Zero Dawn releasing a few days before Breath of the Wild. While much smaller than Twitch, neither of these two streaming platforms is exactly underground: Kick was launched in recent months by controversial streamer Trainwreck as a gambling-friendly alternative to Twitch, while Trovo is owned by Tencent.

According to Kotaku, Tears of the Kingdom streams have also popped up in a more private venue: Discord servers. One of the largest has already been shut down.