On the 27th of February, Nintendo released patch 1.2.0 for Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, including multiple new features and additions to the game. While some of these adjustments were small, such as changes to box presentation and features, there were also some more notable inclusions to this patch including a new Battle Stadium for online competitions and events, the ability for players to connect their Pokémon Go accounts to their Scarlet and Violet saves and the release of the new DLC, The Hidden Treasure of Area Zero, on the Nintendo eShop. Unfortunately, the latter two of these patches have caused severe problems for some players, in most of these cases, outright deleting their save files entirely.
Five days ago, a Reddit post in r/PokémonScarletViolet was released claiming that, at the time of posting, multiple people in the subreddit had lost their their save files when trying to download the most recent DLC, or when trying to link Pokémon Scarlet and Violet to their Pokémon Go account. This comment now has almost 750 comments of people in the community either sympathizing, or sharing their stories of similar occurrences. While this bug has only occurred to a very small population of the people playing the game, it has still been a cause of concern for many players because it could happen to anyone.
According to Siliconera, this loss of save data could happen from as little as buying the DLC pack, or trying to send a postcard from Pokémon Go to their Switch game. It is important to note that there are no backup save files for any of these games, so these losses are permanent unless Nintendo themselves stepped in.
While many have hoped that Nintendo would step in to help, in a Kotaku article about the issue, they note that many people have tried to reach out, including themselves, to try to get a response on the issue. However, most people who attempted to get an answer were met with little to no response. Many think that this lack of response is due to how few people have been affected by the issue. With the low amount of people affected, there is only so much that can be done to prove the issue actually occurred beyond the community explaining what happened.
So far there has been little response from Nintendo on the issue, but as the bug continues to be an issue able to affect players, the number of corrupted save files will only grow. Most people now await Nintendo’s response to the issue, as there are very few available options for many of these people outside of that.