It appears another “gigaleak” has gone down, involving Nintendo. According to sources online, it appears that Game Freak has been hacked, resulting in internal data from the company being leaked to the public. Those involved in the hacking community or those within general Pokemon related groups are claiming that while they will not be discussing or dissecting the specifics within the leak, it initially is being claimed that there is a total of 1TB of data.
This allegedly includes the source code for Pokemon Platinum, source codes for Pokemon HeartGold and SoulSilver, beta builds of Pokemon Black and White 2, beta builds of Pokemon X and Y, and potential internal codenames for upcoming Pokemon projects. Within it are mentions of an online Pokemon game, a collaborative project between Game Freak and Studio ILCA, the potential code name of the Nintendo Switch 2 being “Ounce”, and a project named Gaia, which may be the next generation of Pokemon titles.
Sounds great! Literally nothing bad will come out of this, except some excellent Gen 4-5 RomHacks down the road from the community… Pokemon in itself is not really hard to code game-wise. What people care about is Pokemon ™ brand - so it is not like 3rd party devs can expect to gain anything from this leak. What we will get is more unlicensed fangames
Will this actually improve the ROM hack scene? I assume anything taking advantage of the source code would be too legally risky to release publicly.
My assumption is having the source code out there inherently makes the ROM binary more understandable (able to diff against the source code) and behavior more thoroughly documented.