The Legend of Zelda: Tears of a Kingdom has sold over 10 million copies in the first three days despite being released on a 6-year-old console and locked at 30fps.
The game’s opening success is more than 20 percent of the best-selling Switch game of all time—and again, in only three days.
In an unsurprising twist, Nintendo is cracking down hard on anyone who tries to pirate it.
Just recently, Nintendo won a long legal battle with a pirating site, Dstorage. GamesIndustry Nintendo stated Dstorage failed to remove or block access to pirated copies of Nintendo games.
Nintendo demanded Dstorage to take down any unauthorized content stored on its site. When Dstorage didn’t comply, Nintendo went after them hard.
The entire legal battle happened in France (where the website operator was located) and the Paris Court of Appeals ordered Dstorage to pay €442,750 to Nintendo in compensation and €25,000 to cover legal fees.
Not only that, but a man named Gary Bowser (that’s his real name) was swarmed by Nintendo for his involvement with “Maxconsole”—a website dedicated to hacking video games.
Bowser spent 40 months in prison, and upon release, was ordered to pay 25-30 percent of his income to Nintendo for the rest of his life.
Yikes.
And it doesn’t end there! Popular YouTuber, PointCrow, was recently targeted by Nintendo’s legal team for streaming videos of his custom-modded Zelda game.
Nintendo issued copyright strikes against him (jeopardizing his ability to make money on the platform) over custom mods he made and used for videos.
Apparently, Nintendo doesn’t even want people potentially messing with or hacking their games.
All the success Nintendo has had has put them in a position to defend what is theirs, and anything on pirate websites, or hacking programs, has been deemed a threat. Their legal team has ramped up their activities and even smaller websites or streamers are being targeted.
Enjoy Tears of a Kingdom, but don’t steal! Nintendo is watching.
