GameStop: A former employee has claimed he was fired from the chain after sharing a sort of Tears of the Kingdom OLED leak at Nintendo’s request.
A former GameStop employee says he was fired after leaking an image related to the new The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom-themed Nintendo Switch OLED. According to him, Nintendo discovered the situation and “demanded” GameStop for his dismissal.
More precisely, in March 2023, the employee shared an image showing a screenshot of GameStop’s internal inventory and hinting at the upcoming announcement of a limited edition Tears of the Kingdom-themed OLED console for Nintendo Switch. As you know, the news turned out to be accurate, but the GameStop employee says his “very accurate guess” cost him his job.
The employee told Kotaku he was fired about two weeks after sharing the leaked image on Reddit. According to his statement, he reached for his afternoon shift on that day when he came face-to-face with his district manager and another supervisor. He confessed to the allegations but said he was unaware that he had broken any rules. Nonetheless, he said he was suspended and then officially fired shortly after that.
During the firing, a store manager allegedly told the employee that Nintendo had asked for him to be fired. “They demanded that I be fired, or their contract with GameStop would be in ‘jeopardy,'” the employee says on Reddit.
In another post on Reddit, the former employee says he doesn’t rule out the possibility that the decision to fire him was made only by GameStop and that the chain wanted to blame Nintendo. However, he also says it’s “quite believable” that this isn’t the case.
Obviously, these are the words of the person fired: we have no official answers that tell the story from another point of view, so we cannot assume that everything reported is accurate.
