Nintendo and the Smash Community

Fighting games are some of the most popular kinds of games in the world at the moment, especially in the modern world of esports. Naturally, a good fighting game is supported by its fans, but an amazing one is supported by its developers extensively too. Yet Nintendo always seems to be one-step behind other companies and publishers in how they treat their star fighting game franchise, Super Smash Brothers. Often shortened to just Smash or Smash Bros. when talking about the series as a whole, Smash games are unique due to their unorthodox style of platform-based gameplay. This uniqueness is what brings millions of fans to the game, with the most recent title in the series Smash Ultimate selling well over 31 million copies worldwide, and has 19 billion total battles played. But in spite of the massive support Smash has as a whole, Nintendo always seems to be working in the worst interests of the series and its fans. Nintendo constantly threatens or just straight up terminates tournaments that are almost always grassroot events, refuses to open a tournament circuit for the game holding it back competitively, and has been historically uncaring about the competitive scene.

I did claim before that Nintendo has refused to open a circuit for Smash, and while that is true there actually has been two circuits before. They were under a series called the “Smash World Tour.” It was a series of familiar and new tournaments hosted during 2021. It was the first time there’s ever been a Smash circuit, and it happening during the worldwide pandemic also wasn’t particularly great timing, but it still went off in spite of all the issues the creators of the circuit, VGBootCamp, had to deal with. But for 2022, things didn’t go as smoothly. Towards the end of 2021 Panda Global, which was a popular sponsorship team in other fighting games but known primarily for Smash, had finally been the ones to strike a partnership with Nintendo. Everyone was surprised, and slightly worried due to Nintendo’s often malicious meddling in the scene. But most people were actually hopeful. Smash World Tour 2022 was also going well, and it looked like there would be two championships for both circuits at the end of the year. However, Nintendo apparently didn’t like that, as the SWT team revealed they killed the entire circuit a few weeks before their championships, “Without any warning, we received notice the night before Thanksgiving from Nintendo that we could no longer operate.” (Kotaku) There was literally no positive reason Nintendo could’ve done this, and the fact that Panda Global had ditched the community for the company who hates the community this much did not go well for them. Doing this on such a short notice is needlessly unfair and proves Nintendo’s total lack of care for the community, wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars for VGBootCamp and the community as a whole.

Things like this constantly happen to the Smash scene, leading to immense distrust from most of the community whenever Nintendo ends up getting more involved than usual. Nintendo’s stance on modified game content has been harsher than any other company. In December 2020 during the heat of the pandemic, a popular tournament in “The Big House” series was set to be hosted that year. It was notably a tournament that included the entire Smash series of games, making it a great event for both Melee and Ultimate players, which are the most popular Smash games at the moment. However due to COVID and the resulting lockdown the tournament, like every other in-person tournament after the first few months of 2020, ended up being canceled. But things weren’t that bad, as The Big House would come back as an online-only tournament. Sadly, things really were that bad because as Nintendo directly states, “Unfortunately, the upcoming Big House tournament announced plans to host an online tournament for Super Smash Bros. Melee that requires use of illegally copied versions of the game in conjunction with a mod called “Slippi” during their online event.” (Polygon) While Nintendo legally has all the right to do this, there’s far too many layers on how unfair this was for the Melee community. For one, there’s no official way to even play Melee online. It would be monumentally easy to make a version of Melee on modern hardware for Nintendo yet they chose, and continue to choose, to not re-release or remake any Smash games on later platforms. It’s not like Nintendo is averse to this as a whole. Super Mario 3D All-Stars was exactly this: a port of three of the 3D Mario games which were released on multiple platforms years ago including the GameCube and Wii, the consoles that Melee is played on the most. Two, Melee, while being popular in its own right, was hit very hard by The Big House’s absence as it’s often one of the largest and most prestigious tournaments hosted. Not having it at all means there’s one less major tournament in the year, which impacts competitors heavily. And three, Melee doesn’t even have any form of online at all. Meaning Nintendo would rather there be no tournaments at all than host one using Slippi, as if the competitive scene isn’t a large part of what makes Smash games popular.

As important as having online can be in a competitive game, having bad or low quality online is not much better. Hence why Slippi is so valuable for the Melee community. But to move away from Melee for a second, Ultimate also suffers from Nintendo’s lack of support even in spite of it easily receiving the most support of any Smash games so far. Which honestly isn’t really saying much. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate quite possibly has some of the worst online in any game I’ve played. It’s quite disappointing when compared to other games especially. Even the previous Smash game, Smash 4 had considerably more usable online. Firstly, there’s the quality. Now, I wanted to get a second opinion for how bad the online is, so I interviewed my friend David. He mentioned online being “slow and unreliable” and that “simpler characters are basically the meta [most effective] because they don’t get ruined as much from lag, but the harder characters are very hard to have fun with.” I’m not surprised at all to see David say this. There are 6 frames per second of input lag in general for Ultimate. That probably sounds like it’s not so bad if you aren’t familiar with these kinds of games, but even 1 frame can make a large difference when it comes to reacting and performing frame perfect inputs. Online, this 6 frame delay becomes 11 frames, which is FAR more problematic. And this is if your connection is good and doesn’t even account for things like being connected with people countries away because even after setting your region it still can match you against people horrifically far away. Nintendo Switch’s online is considerably cheap, but even for 20$ a year this is still hardly excusable, especially when their previous, weaker console had more consistency online. Even outside of lag, Ultimate’s online leaves a lot to be desired. For some reason, instead of a casual and competitive mode like in Sm4sh, there’s Quickplay and Elite Smash. Quickplay becomes Elite Smash when you have a certain level of Global Smash Points (GSP) in a character which is earned by winning matches. However, this only applies to that character with a high GSP, not the entire roster. So if you play multiple characters you need to do a lot of work getting your GSP up to avoid getting matches with items that destroy the balance of the game or stage hazards so obnoxious no one would ever even consider picking the stage unless you like watching people suffer. And if your GSP drops below the Elite Smash threshold, you are removed from being able to play Elite Smash. This is fine in theory, because it means you are rewarded with being able to fight better players the better you are. In practice, this is mostly annoying and due to losing MUCH more GSP than you earn normally, it encourages you to constantly only worry about winning over having any fun. Thus, degenerate strategies are created that often take advantage of the high input delay so you can get as much GSP as possible. And now you can see the problem of just not making Elite Smash selectable. You shouldn’t have to work to unlock the basic privileges of a competitive ruleset. Nintendo’s lack of effort put into Ultimate’s online leads to competitive players being stunted when it comes to practice, as playing online can almost feel like a different game due to the lag and delay.

It really is a shame to see Nintendo take the Smash community and even the game itself for granted. As they’ll always have their defenders in the forms of children and adults with too much free time, they can easily do anything they want. Whether it’s canceling tournaments or stopping popular mods there’s basically nothing that can be done because they’re the owners of the franchise. And it’s honestly sad seeing how the community is so devoted to the game while Nintendo just… doesn’t really care. It’d be nice if they change their ways at some point, but with them being notorious for being unwilling to change when it comes to anything, it took them four-and-a-half years to add bluetooth headphone support to their new-gen console, it feels like that’s just never gonna happen. The only thing we can hope for fans of their games to stop blindly defending them, and maybe then something could actually change.