Last month, Nintendo announced a brand-newTears of the Kingdom-themed Switch OLED, but the reveal was leaked the day before. This was thanks to aGameStopemployee by the name of Mike, who claims that he wanted to give others a heads-up in case pre-orders went live. However, in doing so, he got himself fired.
As reported byKotaku, it was fairly obvious that a GameStop employee leaked the Switch OLED news since he did so by posting a photo of a GameStop computer screen listing the inventory database with the new model. It hadalready leaked in December 2022, but Mike speculated that it would be announced during the next day’sTotKstream.
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Mike says he was fired on April 11, two weeks after the stream. Speaking to Kotaku, he said that he believes the Reddit post he made wasn’t that big of a deal since it was mostly speculative, but he was called into the backroom for a meeting with a GameStop supervisor appearing over a video conference. He was then asked if he made the post and if he knew it breached company policy.
His keys were taken away and he was later fired.
During the meeting, Mike did confess to the leak and denied knowing it was against company policy. However, given that most of his social media accounts were linked to his Reddit profile, it would have been easy to track down the person responsible even if he didn’t confess. Mike says that he “wasn’t really trying to cover [his] tracks because [he] didn’t know it would lead to this”.
Now out of the job, he said in a follow-up Reddit post, “Hopefully all of you were able to get your switch pre-orders in as now I will not be able to get mine”, to which many replied suggesting he set up a GoFundMe, but Mike declined, instead asking people to support him via hisTwitch.
Mike has a theory about why he lost his job - he thinks Nintendo is responsible. He claims that the supervisor told him “off the record” that Nintendo demanded he is fired, which another employee told Kotaku was true. They said, “He was an amazing worker” and one of the top performers in his area.
When Mike was fired over the phone, he claims to have been told, “This is your favourite company and now they hate you”, seemingly corroborating these other claims. Whether Nintendo truly did demand him to be fired from GameStop isn’t clear, as Nintendo has yet to release a public statement.
TheGamer reached out to Nintendo and GameStop, but neither responded to a request for comment.
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