That's really just because stuff like the DiC cartoons and of course the Super Mario Bros. movie were disasters that basically made Nintendo swore off ancillery media for their IPs for years, baring the ocassional Kirby, Pokemon or even strangely enough F-Zero.
Honestly I imagine seeing what happened with the Sonic Archie comics and Ken Penders may of made them leary of this type of thing, too. I wouldn't be entirely surprised if the Mario IP team was put together as a response to that.
Pick one. Because in my heart, they were never disasters when they provided so much meme material and helped create YouTube's answer to dadaism - the
Youtube Poop .
Nah but seriously, the Super Mario cartoons did survive 3 incarnations - sure, it wasn't much good (such as Magikoopa being called "Wiesenheimer" for no reason in one episode, even if I personally love the name because it's so dumb), but the average cartoon quality was not the best at the time and evidently it did its job. The standard TMNT '87 episode back then was not exactly amazing to name an example, but TMNT '87 was also everywhere at the time. Likewise, the Wizard movie is far from a good one... but it did help sell SMB 3 and the Power Glove.
I'd pin that more on the Zelda / Captain N cartoons not being especially successful and arguably worse. The Super Mario movie is fair though, that's a major reason Nintendo largely stopped until the animes.
SEGA did reboot the comics no questions asked and continued on as usual with IDW. And considering characters created in the rebooted IDW comics like Tangle the Lemur and Whisper the Wolf were well-recieved they're in a good place.
It took almost a year but it seems the waves of the allegations, true and false alike, are finally settling down. Most of them, anyway. I have a few bones to pick at a few people still, though, as they were virtually untouched and that ruffled my jimmies.
It's easier to say with hindsight, but the very vague ("X said, Y said" nature of it all made things extremely difficult to call. Yes, some were untouched while others were persecuted too harshly, but there were also quite a few that were rightly kicked out.
Still though, I'm not going to sugarcoat things, it was really bad. Especially when the Code of Conduct panel was overwhelmed and disbanded. Silver lining is that there's a real drive to try and ensure it doesn't happen at least as often.
From what I understand, they flirt with casual stuff, but have 0 interest in Super Smash Bros. as a super competitive game. They are marketing it as solely a party game for funsies after all.
Does the community really 'want' Nintendo to get super deep into the whole FGC scene?
Because I know for a fact that knowing them, one of the first things they'd do is try to kill of the Melee part of it, much like it's heavily rumored that they did to the Project M scene.
As much as I'd like Smash to be on the same stage as its FGC peers, trusting Nintendo in that way makes me raise an eyebrow to the point that my forehead starts hurting.
That's something I've also noticed with Nintendo's official tournaments - sure they've run tournaments that are aligned more with competitive rulesets (at least in Japan), but it's always been on their terms and pretty inconsistent.
NoE did have a European Circuit, so they're more permissive as well... although that was stopped dead by the pandemic. The big showy stuff have also been inconsistently held, which is something to note in this context (like
one Squad Strike 4-team tournament in June 2019 that hasn't been repeated. Probably because of the pandemic, but still.).
Honestly, Nintendo's actions did land them in a very awkward spot where it looked like they wanted to hardcore discourage super competitive sides of their games... but didn't entirely stop it because they want the free marketing. Thing is, I'm not sure what Nintendo's endgame is here. It hasn't stopped the Golden State Warriors from getting involved (via Golden Guardians, their e-sports team):
There was a problem fetching the tweet
I should note that GSW are both A) Incredibly rich, so Nintendo might think twice before trying to discourage and B) Hardcore committing to Smash, giving
$50K to grassroots Melee orgs.
Considering a lot of Smashers stream and things like the
Smash World Tour are getting more resources... I'm increasingly of the belief that Nintendo will have to (begrudgingly) accept that. Sure, most casuals won't care - but most LoL players are casuals that don't care about e-sports, yet it's the title most associated with it for a reason.