The Pokémon Company will receive $150 for a Sword & Shield leak

The Pokémon Company settled a lawsuit with two people who leaked images from a printed guide to Pokémon Sword & Shield ahead of its 2019 release. The book had photos of previously unseen mechanics from the games, such as the monsters' Gigantamax forms. The company demanded a payment of US$ 150 (about R$ 745) to cover damages and attorney costs.

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Pokémon Sword and Shield (Image: Handout/The Pokémon Company)

According to Polygon - which had access to the process documents -, the agreement was closed last Tuesday (22). The lawsuit was opened in November 2019 when users posted the photos in the chat of a Discord server.

In the course of the investigation, the Pokémon Company discovered that one of the defendants was an employee of the company that printed the guides and was responsible for producing the photos. Meanwhile, the other person was in charge of sharing the images with other users via Discord.

In the initial petition, the Pokémon Company said it reacted quickly to the leaks, but not in time to stop the photos from ending up on other networks such as Reddit and 4chan. Defendants agreed to pay the $150 fine rather than wait for a court verdict.

Pokemon Sword & Shield have been leaked other times
Sharing the photos on Discord wasn't the only Pokémon Sword & Shield leak. The Portuguese website FNintendo also published images of the games before the launch, but instead of being sued, the portal entered Nintendo's banned list and did not receive news from the company or invitations to events.

Due to the leaked images, fans of the franchise were disappointed with the look of the games in relation to the announcement trailers and promotional photos that had been shown initially. At the time, the community even raised the hashtag “#GameFreakLied” in response to material shared on social media.