Fighting Games Friday: New Smash Bros. Ultimate Tournament Drama
When the announcement came that Nintendo had shut down the Smash World Tour, it came as no surprise — if not expected. Nintendo has a semi-lengthy history of not playing well with tournaments they don’t hold themselves. The tournament community and those who simply like to watch matches first took serious notice of it when Nintendo tried to cancel the Super Smash Bros. Melee tournament at Evo 2013, only to reverse the decision after deservedly intense fan backlash. For a time, it appeared that Nintendo learned their lesson and would continue to work more closely with tournament organizers. But they’ve reversed course in the last few years, unceremoniously pulling the rug out from under the feet of several tournament organizers.
This specific cancellation, on the other hand, is a bit more complicated than the others. Nintendo recently teamed up with Panda Circuit to sponsor a series of tournaments, the CEO of the latter of which allegedly did their best to coerce and undermine tournament organizers and players. The CEO wanted broadcasting rights for the events under Panda Cup, despite previous broadcasting deals existing with competing popular broadcaster Beyond the Summit (BTS — not that one). Most events refused to break their broadcasting deals for his sake, especially for free. The end result was the CEO making a series of threats to BTS, including getting Nintendo involved. It was clear he succeeded, and brought the whole thing down with Nintendo’s cancellation.
It’s a shame that the Panda CEO was the kind of selfish person to have an entire organized tournament torn down because he didn’t get what he wanted. Considering Dr. Alan has been around the Smash Bros. tournament community for years (a fact he very much wants people to know), he knew how Nintendo could potentially react if he went to them to address a specific piece of tournament drama. But it’s not like Nintendo couldn’t have proceeded more carefully, instead of doing their usual thing by being hostile to “outside” tournaments. This all ended in too predictable a fashion.
(It’s also quite funny that Dr. Alan hasn’t locked down his Twitter account. He had to know that a torrent of criticism was headed in his direction, now unleashed in his replies and quoted tweets.)
Nintendo didn’t have to end it in this way. They could have simply listened to a community that wanted a tournament to progress instead of taking the word of a CEO who felt he wasn’t getting enough revenue and attention. A Nintendo spokesperson provided a statement to Kotaku in which they said that “after continuous conversations with Smash World Tour, and after giving the same deep consideration we apply to any potential partner, [they] were unable to come to an agreement with SWT for a full circuit in 2023.” They clarified that they did not cancel any remaining events in 2022. It’s a predictably non-specific statement that dodges a bunch of details.
The Smash World Tour organizers disputed this in a statement in a follow-up one, also to Kotaku, saying that they “asked if [they] could continue running the Championships and the Tour next year without a license, and shift our focus to working with [Nintendo] in 2024.” Nintendo, according to the organizers, told them that “those times were now over.” They claimed to have “asked Nintendo multiple times if they had considered the implications of canceling the Championships as well as next year’s Tour.” Nintendo, however, “affirmed that they had considered all variables.” Nintendo has weathered a bunch of previous storms when it’s come to cancelling fan events, so they’re confident they’ll weather this one too. SWT said they hadn’t even applied for a license for the 2023 tournament season.
Perhaps Nintendo shouldn’t be so confident. The company released a longer statement to IGN disputing claims of their hostility towards the tournament community, saying they only cancelled the Smash World tour for next year. But the damage has been done. A number of professional players are refusing to take part in official Nintendo Smash tournaments now in protest. It’s difficult to tell whether the number of them will be large enough to make a difference, but it will at least produce a small hurdle for Nintendo themselves. These types of boycotts tend to have ripple effects.
It’s tough to tell what will happen, but Nintendo sure seems content to continue playing with fire. It may not be possible for them to be burned with their own fireball shots, but they could be repelled if too many tournament participants take a stand and start boycotting the biggest events, and even get players on board to stop watching the streamed events. This is all, of course, assuming Nintendo cares enough about tournaments and the revenue they’ll get from them to begin with, and several indications suggest they don’t. It’s clear Nintendo won’t be stopping here.
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Geoff
News Editor | Geoff is some nerd who writes for a blog and thinks he's knowledgeable. He write a lot about video games, but is capable of writing about other subjects, too. Twitter
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Interesting pointing out “drama”. If the drama doesn’t sell more copies of smash maybe that’s one reason for Nintendo to be less supportive ?
True. I can’t imagine anyone’s looking at this and saying “whoa, that reminds me that I need to buy Ultimate.”
Standard Nintendo logic: “We didn’t cancel the remaining events in 2022, but we will no longer allow you operate without a license and we will not provide one, either, for those events.”
This is very much a beneficial outcome for Panda and their event, too, since the SWT was viewed as a sort of Playoffs/Super Bowl for fans of the game, even among the non-Alan members of Panda itself.
Panda did release a statement, at last. It said nothing of value and seems to have soured people that much more. Many of the best and most well-known players, including MKLeo and Hungrybox, added their support to the boycott. On top of all that, Ludwig has responded by hosting a small tournament of his own for both the Top 8 (according to SWT’s point system) of Melee and Ultimate with a $50,000 prize pool that just so happens to take place on the last day of the Panda Cup finals to help raise money for VGBC – https://twitter.com/LudwigAhgren/status/1598768346635603968
Yeah, if anything, Panda is doing very well here. There’s no need to go as far as locking a Twitter account when you know you’ve won in the end. That’s the part that blows about all this.
Oh, and in Lidwig’s YT video announcing his event, he mentioned Ken Chen’s tweet about how the NDAs from Panda were not written up properly AND some of the most prominent members of Panda have resigned, including iBDW, currently the second-best Melee player in the world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAcebxT9vnA
Nintendo and Panda kind of sort of really fucked up on all this.
Okay, maybe Panda isn’t ultimately winning. But man, sometimes it feels like Nintendo looks for excuses to kill tournaments.