A week before its official release, Splatoon 3 is in the wild

Splatoon 3 has seemingly made its way into the hands of users, a week before its official release.

One social media user who is posting under the handle ‘@Splatoon3Leaks’ has uploaded around 30 videos of the game’s single-player offering, although at the time of writing, some of these videos are being removed for copyright violations.

According to social media users, players have also begun dumping the game’s files to the PC with a cracked version of the game already being distributed online.

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Unsurprisingly, it appears that players are unable to access the multiplayer portion of the game before its servers go live around September 9.

It’s unclear if Nintendo plans to act against the users who’ve been posting spoilers around the game’s single-player offering on social media, including the entire ending, which is currently on YouTube.

Splatoon 3 will release on  September 9, 2022.

PC emulation and broken street dates have become an increasingly common issue for Nintendo in recent months, with many of its recent releases appearing on file-sharing sites ahead of their official releases.

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 faced a similar situation to Splatoon 3 when early copies of the game appeared in the wild, which led to the game being circulated long before release.

Pokemon Legends Arceus saw players streaming a pirated version of the game to Twitch, two weeks before the game hit store shelves. 

In November 2021, Twitch users also started live streaming early copies of Pokémon Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl, as much as ten days before their official release.

In 2020 Nintendo publicly cut ties with a Portuguese website after it was found to have been behind some pre-launch Pokémon Sword and Shield leaks.