Jack Kieser
Smash Champion
Honestly, I don't either. Dude, I have a REALLY short attention span sometimes, like I'm a friggin' ferret or something, and even I can get hype enough to watch TSM for 45 minutes (plz notice me, WildTurtle-senpai T_T ). A 6 minute Smash match is not past people's attention span, or at least I'll say that if they're already used to long-form gaming (like LoL or SCII) or to watching Smash (duh).
That being said, for people only used to fighting games, or used to other short-form gaming (although, there's not much else), 6-8 minutes per match / 12-24 minutes per set is kind of long. Especially if the play isn't hype. It really depends on the person and the quality of play.
Totally agree. If our goal is tournament length, we also need to have those discussions, and for new TOs or bad TOs, that discussion totally comes first.
I think the reason some people are content to move onto the match length discussion is because for a lot of TOs (and I've never been to one of your events, but this sounds like it's the case with you, too), they're already well run, well managed events, and those criticisms don't apply. Yet, some people still think your well-managed events are too long. Correct me if I'm wrong @
SamuraiPanda
, but I think you're one of those people. I would agree. Even well managed events run too long for my tastes sometimes, as an adult with adult things to do.That being said... not everyone is talking tournament length. And that brings me to...
This is entirely true. Part of this is due to the FGC community. Not a whole lot of people want to watch the games of admitted and obvious sexists (remember Cross Assault?). Or racists. Or people who throw f**k and s**t around every match. Or people who call moves 'gay' on stream. Let's be clear: this is ABSOLUTELY getting better, not just in the general FGC, but here at home, too. But, we ALL have a reputation to repair, and that takes time, AND marketing. Our viewership, not just in the FGC at large, but in Smash, too, would be way better if we could appeal to women more than we already do (god damn, seeing women at the Invitational hyped me so much, I love statistically accurate representation
).Other than that, there's really no rational reason that fighting games can't garner great viewership numbers. We all just have to market better. This isn't affected by match length, but it IS something that would be easier if we were in this fight with the entire FGC, and not just by ourselves. And, that's more likely to happen if we standardize our play pacing.
I don't really know where you get that impression from, because I've never viewed it that way, unless you're talking Smash players vs. FGC players (casual AND professional), in which case, yeah, Nintendo.
If you could provide some sort of numbers that suggest pro Smash is more played and more watched than traditional FGC content, that'd be helpful (unless, again, that's not what you meant).Well, being separate from them certainly doesn't help us. After all, you don't see us with the silver bullet that solves playership / viewership problems. It's not like, on our own, we're just freaking EXPLODING with viewers or players. Yes, we're absolutely doing better than we've ever done (SWF milestones yeah), but we're not pulling in LoL viewer numbers, either, and we're nowhere on that path, nor are there signs that we're going to be anytime soon.
Certainly, there are worse things than allying ourselves with the rest of the FGC. We're all fighting games. Their golden boy for the past few years, ChrisG, came from us. We all want better representation in gaming. We all have relatively similar issues to deal with. We all have, in a lot of ways, a shared culture. There are many things we can do worse than having Smash at more FGC events and more Marvel at our events.
After all, say what you want about the FGC and EVO, but they managed to do something no one else, NOT EVEN US, could manage to do: they got Nintendo to officially sponsor a for-money tournament. Seems like they beat us to, at bare minimum, THAT punch, and unless AlphaZealot has some news he needs to share with the rest of us, is more than SWF has managed to do to get official sponsorship at an event. That's some help we sorely need.
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