Pyoro admits primary source is Nintendo of Japan employee who seemingly had access to Nintendo’s web backend

Bloomberg video game journalist Jason Schreier has published an interesting article looking at various high profile video game leakers and naturally one of those is Pyoro. Pyoro has in the past been a thorn in Nintendo’s backside with his accurate leaks of Nintendo games ahead of Nintendo Direct presentations. Though he was unusually quiet in the run up to the latest Nintendo Direct, only teasing a few smaller games and saying that he “didn’t expect many big announcements.” This was proven factually wrong after the Nintendo Direct presentation which included a number of heavy hitters scheduled for this year and beyond. Speaking to Jason, Pyoro says that his information source is a Nintendo of Japan employee who seemingly has access to the company’s web backend. Here’s what was said in the article:

“Nobody knew Pyoro’s identity or how they got information, but as the account continued to predict new announcements with a perfect track record, they attracted a huge audience. The account gained more than 100,000 followers on X and inspired a series of threads on the large, gaming forum ResetEra.

But Pyoro was uncharacteristically quiet ahead of this week’s Nintendo Direct, saying that they didn’t expect many big announcements. They were subsequently proven wrong when the company showed off new Mario, Zelda and Metroid games. People wondered: how could an account with a perfect batting average suddenly get things so wrong?

Then came a twist. Several observers — led by a ResetEra poster called dgamemaster — began to realize that in contrast to previous announcements, these new surprises did not have pre-seeded webpages on Nintendo’s store. They followed the bread crumbs and realized that Pyoro’s previous leaks had all involved games that were set to go live on Nintendo’s website as soon as they were announced. Games that were only put up on the store after the Nintendo Direct were not leaked by Pyoro in advance.

It appeared that Pyoro had access to Nintendo’s web backend, and the account’s information was limited to what was available there.

I reached out to Pyoro to try to get clarity on this. Over direct messages, they told me that their source works for Nintendo of Japan, “but I’m unsure how they obtain their information” and that the “backend theory is a reasonable guess.” 

Pyoro is just the latest mysterious rumormonger to get knocked off a pedestal in recent weeks.”

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