At a certain point I wonder which type of leak Nintendo sees as the greater evil: Leaking in-game content like spirits and music or """leaking""" lists of characters many of whom aren't actually being considered which gets people's hopes up and leads to backlash when things don't turn out that way (i.e. the Grinch leak). The objective information of copyright takedowns on Youtube point to that being the bigger issue for them but if they were so distressed by just the Isaac backlash I can only imagine how they felt about all the people let down by the Grinch leak being a lie.
Honestly, the reaction to the Grinch leak has put Nintendo in a weird place when it comes to DLC.
If that leak never happened, they could have shoved basically any Square character at the fans, and while Geno supporters would be quite disappointed that it wasn’t him, the majority would be satisfied.
But no, instead we had a full week-and-a-half where basically the majority of the gaming Internet(thanks to news sites publicizing the leak far and wide) legitimately believed that Geno was in. And then it turned out that not only was Geno not in, we essentially knew about all the characters since mid-September. And on top of
that, the two characters(not counting Ken) that seemed the most likely from the leak were deconfirned as ATs, while three others were nothing more than .PNGs in a glorified Event Match/gacha mode.
Since that leak happened and got everyone’s hopes up, now anything besides Geno and Banjo is going to feel like a massive letdown for a pretty sizable group of people that believed that they were really, finally happening a month ago, even ones that never really followed either character too closely. Especially if we get DQ and Steve instead, there’d effectively be
riots.
(For another contender, I’d personally expect Crono to be about 60% well-received, with an extra 40% mix of “Er, did anyone really request him?”, “Really, another anime swordsman?”, and “Come on, where’s Geno?”)