Opinion: Why Nintendo (Probably) Doesn’t Support Smash
One of the biggest reasons for any developer to enter the world of esports is to promote their games and make money off of it. Riot, Blizzard, Capcom, and more have all seen great success this way. The scenes for their games thrive, events are sustainable, and for the most part, everyone gets paid reasonably well.
It makes sense, then, that so many Smashers want Nintendo to get in on the fun. Smash is currently in a position where some — or most — of our biggest, events lose money. Players getting paid on time is so uncommon that it’s worth sharing on social media when it does happen. Even when players are paid, it’s typically not enough to make playing worth it. That’s not even getting into how little event staff and casters make.
So it’s really easy to understand why Smashers want Nintendo to support Smash, and it’s easy to understand why Nintendo would support Smash… or is it?
All Publicity Is Good Publicity?
The typical arguments for Nintendo to support Smash go something like this: “It’s free publicity for Nintendo,” “They’d sell even more copies of Smash,” and so on. But I’m not sure how strong those arguments are.
According to most accounts I can find, 5 million is the least any iteration of Smash has ever sold. And yes, that’s splitting the Wii U and 3DS versions (the 3DS version actually outsold the Wii U version by ~3 million). Now, let’s consider the modern fighting game’s sales. Tekken 7 has been selling extremely quickly, and is expected to push 2.1 million units by the end of the year. Its prequel — Tekken 6 — sold over 3.5 million units. Street Fighter V has sold over 1.7 million units, but isn’t selling nearly as quickly as Tekken 7. Street Fighter IV sold 3.4 million units. Those are the two biggest traditional fighting games right now — others are lucky if they break a million.
I don’t bring this up to say Nintendo doesn’t need/want more sales. But it’s important that it sells more than traditional fighting games. It’s equally important that the 3DS version of Smash outsold the console version, despite being effectively obsolete as far as tournaments go. Why? The audience for competitive fighting games — and competitive Smash — is only a small portion of Smash’s total audience.
When someone picks up Tekken or Street Fighter, they do it because they’re getting a traditional, 1v1 fighting game experience. But when they pick up Smash, there are a million different ways they can play before ever touching the traditional 1v1 or 2v2 modes that are familiar to our community. This isn’t a grand revelation, but consider what it means — we only provide one way of promoting Smash for Nintendo.
Smash is not (just) a fighting game
When Capcom promotes Street Fighter V, they’re promoting the full meat of the game. That 1v1 competitive mode is what they expect people to buy it for. When Nintendo promotes competitive ARMS, Splatoon, or even Pokken they are doing the same thing — promoting the base game. But when Nintendo promotes competitive Smash, they only get to promote a small portion of what’s in Smash. One of the biggest selling points of Smash is that you can play it in many ways — and they probably don’t want to promote one way over another… especially if you consider how traditional 1v1 fighting games sell in comparison to Smash.
I think the biggest hint Nintendo gives in this direction comes from the Smash 4 Invitational. It ended with a nod to our community — 1v1, no items, neutral stage — but it showed off many other ways to play Smash before that. That’s how Nintendo wants to show off Smash, by showing off the entire game. Nintendo gets more sales this way, because their fans are casual AND competitive. But none of our tournaments cater to that — with the exception of smaller ones like Glitch.
By supporting our Smash scene with money, a circuit, etc., they risk saying that the right way to play Smash is the way we’ve defined it; the competitive way. And that’s probably not what they want to sell, because it simply doesn’t perform as well.
