>>41625510This is the last straw.
Starting with Gen 6, Game Freak implemented the worldwide release system for Pokemon games. Before this point, leaks did not matter because months would go by between the leaked Japanese versions and the release dates of every international version. Months would pass by and opinions of the game smooth over as people forget about the flaws. So back then leaks were not a big issue for TPC, GF, or Nintendo.
But then people leaked the game in advance. XY were not a big issue aside from a few leakers playing the game via broken street dates, GF thought it was just a store issue, not a consumer issue, so they punished stores that released games too early. Then ORAS came along and we had the first public demo of an internationally released game. It was dataminers for all of the content from the final build. This was the first slight, but since these were remakes, sales were not as big of an issue. SM had a public demo, but most of the contents were scrapped; still every Pokemon image was datamined. This damaged GF enough to never have public demos again, only tightly controlled demos at their choosing. LGPE and SWSH were both leaked and dumped very early, with all of their contents released online within a week to a few days before store date. LGPE was a remake and had most of its info as public knowledge, so that was not a big issue. But TPC tried to minimize any announcements for new Pokemon, features, characters, forms, etc. so as to surprise players who play the game for the first time. Leaks ruined that, so to GF this caused a lot of damage. Their plan was to shock players but the players were already playing dumped and hacked roms.
