How many people play competitive Melee ?

[TheGoat]

I'm curious, does anyone have any idea how many people play Melee competitively or any ideas on how to measure it, now or in the past?
Does anyone have an accurate number for how many people came to Genesis 3, or any other large melee tournaments?
I wish we could do some kind of census measurement on it. I would be excited to know the actual number of competitive players.

 

[Transform987]

I don't think there is anyway to get a number. I'd say it's a large amount, one of the highest competitive fighting game scenes. There is no way to know truly but just considering the amount of people here to talk about melee, it's a hefty amount.

 

[Pauer]

It's definitely a difficult question. I think a good resource for this would be myhandshurt.com, which was published a month or two ago. It's a database of all sets/players that have played melee on (I think) only smash.gg.
Since smashGG is quite a new site, there are only records for the past few years, meaning a low amount of retired players. At the moment there are a little more than 72.000 players in the database from all over the world.
Most small tournaments don't use smash.gg however so the data base is certainly lacking a good chunk of active players, although more dedicated players certainly have gone to at least 1 bigger event that used smash.gg.
It's hard to make up numbers based purely on speculation but I can imagine that at least about twice as many people play the game actively, meaning they meet up to play/use netplay regularly

 

[Applebutter61]

I would say that millions play melee; the vgbootcamp stream for melee at tbh8 had millions of veiws, and there is a scene for melee in almost any city of 50,000 or more

 

[Grandma_Warrior]

More are in the community than actually are competitive