Last November, we saw a series of leaks from Pokémon Sword and Shield ranging from new Dynamax forms to the entire Pokedex revealed ahead of the game’s release date. Turns out that the organization is none other than Portuguese website called FNintendo, who are now blacklisted by the company.

The site explained that an early copy of the game was given to a freelancer to provide coverage. That freelancer leaked the info online; regardless, FNintendo made the call and have to take responsibility.

“We fully respect Nintendo’s decision to cancel the confidentiality agreement between our companies as a result of this breach of trust and accept that we will no longer receive products from Nintendo, nor will we be invited to attend their events.

We want to apologise to Nintendo and The Pokémon Company, and to our readers for letting them down.”

It really sucks that it takes one bad apple to ruin trust between publications and game publishers, but this sort of blacklisting is fair considering that NDAs are signed for these sorts of early access programs. I mean, no company in their right mind would blacklist a publication for other petty infractions (even a “soft-blacklist”, the kind that’s all hearsay & unwritten). Like, oh say for example,  giving a fair first impression of a product which leads to having the product’s parent company’s lead telling its associates to blacklist said publication because of the person’s incredibly fragile ego & pampered outlook.

I mean, nothing like this sort of opinion-curbing nonsense really happens in this corner of Malaysia and Singapore, right? RIGHT?