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On the heels of a massive leak of Pokemon-related projects and announcements purportedly stretching years into the future and touching on an alleged Pokemon Winds and Waves game duo – all of which is unverified and highly subject to change even if legitimate – outspoken former Nintendo marketing lead Kit Ellis reckons the companies ought to go back to the drawing board with information security.
Joined by cohost and fellow ex-marketing lead Krysta Yang, Ellis discussed the Pokemon leak in the duo's latest YouTube video. "Nintendo and Pokemon really need to rethink their approach to information security," Ellis argues. "These are companies that are obsessive about preserving surprises, not being the sources of leaks, and yet these are the companies, two of the companies, that have the most ongoing, significant leaks that we've seen in the entire industry."
Ellis points to the scope of the Pokemon leak – which touched on numerous alleged games, DLCs, and even entire generations of 'mons – as well as the prior Nintendo Switch 2 leaks that spoiled much of the new console's reveal. He reiterates that these are "damaging" things for Nintendo and The Pokemon Company, and says "I really feel bad for them" as it can have "a long-term negative effect on the way that they have to approach all of this stuff."
"But they need to really look in the mirror and be like, 'What are we doing wrong? Because we think we're great at this, but based on the results you're actually not,'" he says.
Yang weighs up the two traditional approaches companies, at least in gaming, take to sharing future plans: revealing projects and ideas early with a grain of salt, or keeping everything hidden until plans are finalized and can be formally announced with concrete timelines.
"My take on this," Ellis says, "just based on our own experiences dealing with leaks at Nintendo, is they, I feel, when something happens, tighten up the same potential places of leaks. And they just keep tightening and tightening the same places. But there are other places that are leak vectors that are maybe not being addressed, maybe not being tightened up, and maybe growing. It's like, 'Oh my gosh, we're so fixated on this one thing. We have to tighten this up, we have to tighten this up.' What if it was never that in the first place and you're entirely focused on the wrong thing?
"I think it's time for them to expand, if they're really serious about, 'This can never happen, this must never happen again,' they need to expand the scope of how they're thinking about this. Because it's often not the thing that you think is where this is all coming from," he concludes.
Yang adds that some security measures she'd seen during her time at the company, like limiting direct communication between personal and work devices, did succeed at annoying staff, but demonstrably "didn't really help the leak situation at all." Concurring with Ellis, she singles out the "perceived false security that a lot of companies are fixated on" and says "they don't address the actual problem."
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