Usually, I hope that the leaks are wrong so I can be surprised by the reveals later, but for this one, the young lady in the Eevee costume, I hope it refers to Mimikyu in an Eevee disguise.
In the Alola games, dataminers discovered an empty placeholder spot for an alternate formof Mimikyu, which ultimately remained unused for the entirety of Generation VII. Eevee experienced a surge of popularity during this generation, so I figured if they'll pick a second Pokémon for Mimikyu to have a disguise of but still functionally remain the same, it would have to be Eevee.
The closer we get, the more agonizing it becomes.
At the very least, it would be nice to be able to pre-purchase the game. I wonder when they'll start that up.
Yeah, most major releases would allow pre-purchasing the game by now. Even if it's to prevent information from coming out, surely you can pre-purchase the game without it being downloaded into the system. I've done that before with the Switch, though I don't remember which games they were.
That being said, considering there have been problems with server overloads in the past with Pokémon game releases, they most likely would have you pre-load the games so that it can be a bit more spread out. There may still be overloads when pre-purchasing is first allowed though.
Me, I've been saving a voucher for this game, the ones you get two of for $100 when you're a member of Nintendo Switch Online. I used one for
Super Mario Maker 2, and I've planned out the wait for this one.
There are just too many people and too many stores involved in the distribution process leading up to release. There's no way they can stop someone somewhere from getting their hands on a copy a little earlier than intended. They can discourage it by aggressively suing anyone caught doing it, but actually catching them is the tough part. There are thousands if not tens of thousands of people involved in distribution, identifying who exactly is responsible for a leak would be challenging.
On the other hand, just reading some comments in this thread and others on this forum, it seems there are some decently well-known locations that breach street date. I am sort of curious as to why Nintendo hasn't gone after them, if it's common enough knowledge that it makes its way onto a forum that, as large as we may be, only represents a rather small fraction of the Pokemon fanbase, surely Nintendo knows about it.
If a game's street date is broken somewhere, it's almost always the fault of someone working there, whether it be management or regular sales associates. Just like home video releases for movies, video games are given to retailers early, and while they're allowed to say they have it, and the bar codes will scan properly, they're not allowed to put it on the store shelves until the specified release date. (That can be as early as midnight though, so accounting for time zones, one can find out about a game up to about a day earlier.) When you see someone playing a game ahead of time, it's very likely one of these things happened:
1. An employee sneaks a copy out of the store, either to play it or to give it to someone. People who sneak them out will lose their jobs if found out, but a few people are crazy enough to not worry about that.
2. Less maliciously, a store receives copies of the games, and they're immediately put onto store shelves because the staff doesn't know about the release date.
3. A game was accidentally made digitally available before it's supposed to.
This is more likely to happen in a store that specializes in selling video games. It's less likely to happen in a general electronics store, such as Best Buy or Fry's Electronics, because they also sell movies on home video, and the big Hollywood studios are a lot more punishing to those who break street dates than video game companies. The general electronics stores are run by people who know of those consequences, and they won't break them for video games either (unless they get one of those aforementioned crazies working there, some of whom might take the job solely to break street date on a specific game).
There is a small chance someone involved in distribution is responsible, but they're much more likely to get caught, since the recipients know how many copies of each game they're supposed to get, and for major releases like this, they'll know if one is missing, which will be reported back to the distributor. (That being said, they shouldn't be counted out. The street dates for issues of
Weekly Shonen Jump are broken every single week, and it turns out it was the distributors who were in on it, since there are scanlation groups paying the distributors to give the magazines to them early. Shueisha, the publisher, has caught some individuals, but they discovered an entire network of distributors doing this and that it's a hydra problem. One costs twelve times as much as the other though, so there will be a difference is priority.)
For the record, movie studios and game companies both do this sort of checking by sending in secret shoppers roughly on the week prior to release and having them report back locations they've found which broke the street date. That makes #1 much harder to track down, because all they know is that a copy had gone missing, and they know the individual involved is willing to take whatever punishments the companies will give, meaning deterrence is impossible. #2 happens usually out of ignorance, so most game companies simply give a warning, enough to scare the business owner into not doing it again (which is why you see some big stores do this and remain in business), though movie companies like Disney and DreamWorks start punishing immediately.
Oh, I could never.
I have to see the entire roster before I play a new Pokémon game. One thing I can't stand is coming across a pokemon I know nothing about, which happened to me a lot in the old days. By Gen 4, I got sick of it, and that's when I found serebii.net.
I remember conversing with someone who was AGHAST that I had planned out what Pokémon to use and to be ready when a new Pokémon appears. Her approach, as it seems is to go into a Pokémon game absolutely blind and look things up later on, upon completing the game (while making sure nothing is permanently lost), and she thought this was the standard. She was astounded that I would ruin the surprise deliberately and plan out how I'd play the game as extensively as I did.
IIRC, it made the trials and tribulations of Gen V tolerable. Due to the scant amount of information we've been provided this time around however, I doubt I'll be able to be as thorough with SwSh as I was with SMUSUM.