Smash tournament highlights friction between Nintendo and professional players

Fans of competitive Super Smash Brothers aren’t pleased with developer Nintendo, largely thanks to the company’s attempts at establishing a licensed competitive scene after years of antagonizing existing unofficial communities.

The video game juggernaut announced the latest iteration of its NintendoVS series Monday, an online tournament for Smash Ultimate players to compete in. This tournament, the “Challenge Cup,” will take place on February 12th and can be accessed by any owner of the game.

However, for long-time competitive fans the tournament represents too little, too late. The Challenge Cup was scorned online; especially for its prizes, which some viewed as cheap and insulting. Prizes include a Nintendo Switch carrying case and Nintendo Gold points, for use buying games on Nintendo consoles.

The Smash community, in particular the competitive scene, has experienced tremendous growth over the past decade. The series is famous for its intense, fast-paced combat and stunning combo moves, requiring a high degree of skill and speed to play well. Large tournaments will pull hundreds of thousands of viewers (and thousands of entrants), and players like Joseph “Mang0″ Marquez have amassed substantial followings through tournament performances and streaming.

Nintendo’s stance on esports has been consistent - the company has made it clear it would rather prioritize overall game accessibility than more hardcore competitive endeavors. In 2020, when asked if his company was opposed to esports, Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa said, “Esports… demonstrates one of the wonderful charms of video games. It’s not that we’re opposed to it. So that our games can be widely enjoyed by anyone regardless of experience, gender, or age, we want to be able to participate in a wide range of different events.”

He continued: “Our strength, what differentiates us from other companies, is this different world view, not an amount of prize money.”

Nintendo is certainly an outlier in the video game industry, notorious for operating in their own lane and forging unique advancements. When other developers like Blizzard/Activision and Riot began embracing their competitive scenes and setting up tournaments, Nintendo remained a holdout. Today, the largest esports tournaments have prize pools in the tens of millions of dollars, funded by in-game purchases and the developers themselves. Independent tournaments can also get big: at EVO 2019, the largest independent Smash and fighting game tournament, the prize pool was more than $250,000. Two days prior to the announcement of NintendoVS, popular streamer Ludwig Ahgren held a charity tournament with a prize pool of $30,001.

In 2019, Nintendo came under fire for sending cease-and-desists to a group of Smash tournaments playing a modded version of one Super Smash Bros. iteration.

That wave of cease-and-desists by Nintendo can largely be chalked up to COVID and the tournaments going virtual: modded versions of the game have recently been used by some tournaments to allow play across WiFi, not just the traditional in-person, “couch” style of play. Nintendo is also notoriously anti-bootleg, choosing to shut the tournaments down and draw the ire of fans instead of allowing the modded software.

And draw ire it did - many Smash players had gotten comfortable operating independently of Nintendo, and were frustrated to see the company stick its fingers at such an advanced stage.

Fans on Twitter described it as “honestly embarrassing” and claimed Nintendo “hates absolutely HATES their fans and fan base.”

After years of watching developers embrace their competitive scenes and bring them forward to a more professional stage, it seems competitive Smash fans will just have to keep carving their own niche - at least for the time being.