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I want to preface this opinion piece by stating the obvious: HugS is a far more outstanding and knowledgeable community member than myself. He's seen it all from the beginning to the present and I'm some 09'er, and if I were you I would value his opinion over mine. I'm also limiting my scope to what I think our community is actually capable of controlling. For example, eSports unexpectedly dying in the next 15 years is not something to worry about unless it happens. Maybe we should worry about that.
I enjoyed HugS's piece, published in MeleeItOnMe October 9th, however I believe his optimism is warranted only on a superficial level, and I think his arguments suffer from unclear chronology. Their problem is that they speak more to the question of why Melee is currently alive and how it got here rather than why it won't die at some point in the future, which HugS readily admits is a possibility in his opening. On a long enough timeline Melee's death is certain, but that doesn't tell us anything useful. To be absolutely clear, here's my proposed timeline. Melee deserves at least a century of play, and it deserves to be big. Not just eSport big, but Olympics big, NCAA big.
What follows is predicated on anything short of a Melee century being considered an early death. Can you plan that? Probably not, but then again I have no doubt that right now major community members are collaborating with industry professionals to try to accomplish just that. It's what we all want, and the potential for profit is significant. They are inevitably going to run into obstacles that can't be beaten with a reddit fundraiser, or a Facebook campaign, or even all the familiar faces coming out to rally us for a Spirit Bomb, Gods throwing down in the background... There is a timeline where Melee dies, and to be proactive about avoiding it we need to identify those obstacles and learn as much as we can about them before they ever present a real problem. The only tested and proven method for keeping Melee alive through tough times is having an informed and active community ready to go on a moment's notice.
In a skype conversation with Scar in 2013 he asked me about the future of Melee, and I basically paraphrased HugS's article. This was during the EVO drive. I was feeling what everyone was feeling. This is it, the return of the Eternal Game. The prospect of Melee back at the biggest fighting game stage in the world was the culmination of a nearly six-year effort to keep the fire burning and all of us, new members and old, got to enjoy an enormous payoff. Ever pull off a huge comeback against your rival? It felt something like that, but for the whole community, and the feeling didn't go away. Melee as an institution felt and still feels invincible.
Before you keep reading, I need you to let go of that feeling and see the game and the scene with fresh eyes for a second, because if Melee is really going to be the game that lives, the people who will keep it alive haven't even picked up a controller yet. If you don’t keep these people in mind when you discuss the future of Melee, you aren’t discussing the future of Melee. No matter how storied a community might be, if it doesn’t attract enough new players to grow then it will die, but we’re a little more ambitious than mere survival, right?
Here are HugS's main points and a summary of their contents below.
1. "Support From Major Esports Players"
- Our multiple sponsors support and genuinely love Melee, thus they are incentivized to prevent its death.
2. "Resistance to Sequel Replacement"
- Having survived two sequels Melee is ostensibly a standalone title until an HD rerelease/true successor.
3. "Ease of Viewership and Story Lines"
- The human drama and on-screen action of Melee is attractive to general audiences irrespective of specific game knowledge.
4 "Community-based Upbringing"
- Melee is a social binding agent that has cemented a foundation of dedicated community organizers who are also best friends, who won't let each other down by allowing Melee to die
Let's go through them briefly.
1. Our sponsors love and support Melee right now, but we're also a hot commodity right now. They may support us through a rough patch if something happens and viewership declines, but only up to a point. Some of the employees of said sponsors may be fanatics like us, just as enthused and ready to lend a hand. Some might even have significant clout in their respective organizations that they use for Melee's benefit. The love of those individuals reflects neither the will of the shareholders, nor is it any assurance of continued support; to them we are an engine for success. These are their jobs and they cannot support decisions that their numbers say are wrong. We cannot ascribe notions of human loyalty to for-profit entities. They will do what they need to do to survive, as should we. We are well-positioned to profitably coexist with a number of them, but this is sustenance, not insurance. This is a symptom of success, not a cause.
2. This trait is demonstrably a major factor in Melee's staying power; the metagame chugs on ceaselessly while technical wizards like Dan Salvato demonstrate that Melee can be adapted to have increased functionality for a new generation of competitors. If Melee is to survive a century, it's going to need to adapt, and we’re going to need oversight over that adaptation. The elephant in the room is Nintendo. They have the final say over the distribution of what is legally their content. They can prevent us from changing the game if we need to. They can split the community any time they want by re-releasing Melee with the slightest of changes. They're a bull in a china shop, and there's a reckoning to be had over whose game this really is. Until we resolve this Melee will always have two directions, ours and theirs.
Can I even mention PM? Is the gag on? Nintendo may play dumb with their official silence but they've had plenty of chances to take legal action that would lead to PM being an officially approved Nintendo mod, thus giving the game its own life and ensuring tournaments for ostensible Nintendo fans, maybe even making new ones in the process. Instead, they choked the distribution of PM videos and forced tournaments to drop the game once they started officially sponsoring them.
3. This is absolutely true but isn’t unique to Melee. If people start playing other games the stories will follow. Melee also doesn’t have the benefit of next-gen graphics, which shouldn’t be a factor but still might be when it comes to future spectating.
4. Members of the Smash Community reiterate fairly often how exceptional the community they belong to and the games they play are, and can you blame them? Confirmation is everywhere. We are in a growth state. Here is a prevailing pattern of logic I encounter when talking to other fanatics about Melee's Cinderella story: The game is close to perfect for playing and spectating -> players and audiences are more passionate -> they are more willing to organize for the community in their free time + large Nintendo install fanbase -> Melee hits player activism critical mass and gains superpowers. This is the logic underpinning "Why Melee Won't Die", and it doesn't paint a complete picture.
The notion that Melee fanatics feel more strongly about their game than other gamers feel about their games is tempting, but narcissistic. Perhaps most fans would never say this out loud or consciously admit it to themselves, but they feel that they love their game the most, and most Melee players I know freely admit it, AND the incredible streak of activism the Melee community has become known for seems to confirm it. Melee would never ask of us, "What have you done for me lately?" We unquestionably love our game and everything else seems to flow from this constant activity born of love. The reason sponsors are really interested in us? We get things done. Where other communities flounder, we succeed. And we look damn good when we succeed because the love is real.
The problem with this narrative, and this is going to hurt some people, is that being an activist for Melee has been made easier and easier over the years, and is particularly easy if you are middle class, which many smashers happen to be. Melee activism is highly facilitated, as HugS notes, by one of the tightest and most highly functioning groups of friends in the world as well as countless passionate TO's, artists, musicians, modders, and competitors. When you donate to Melee related causes, the numbers are fairly small and you can make a tangible difference with a small contribution, but there are also many larger donors among us. You can make a world of difference at locals just driving TV’s or people around. TO’ing is something anyone can get into thanks to readily available online guides written by the best TO’s in the business.
Don’t get me wrong, we wouldn't be where we are without the hard work of all of those individuals, regardless of their economic status, but communities have worked harder than us and fallen short. Passion is not the the deciding factor. If our community hadn't been at the forefront of game capture, video on demand, and social media activism/organization due largely to the socioeconomic status of its members, then the work of those TO's might not have carried us through the dark ages. This is my take on the beautiful accident. I'm not totally discounting the prevailing narrative, but I think this is how it needs to be reframed if we're to identify the real threats to Melee's continued growth.
...which I still haven't really explained, so here's what I'm afraid will limit the growth of Melee this century:
A. The Metagame Isn't As Resilient As We Think
It has been said before that Melee has a hard limit and a soft limit, the theoretical skill cap and peak human performance, respectively. At the moment the metagame on the international stage is particularly diverse, even vibrant. The best character, Fox, does not perform that much better than the other top tiers and players like Axe and aMSa are reimagining the midtiers and getting results. The worst you can say about the character spreads at most major top 8's is that they're healthy. For now, the soft limit indicates that the game is highly unbalanced, but not broken. As much of a joke as it has become, there's a real possibility this won't always be the case due to training tools like 20XX pushing the soft limit higher and higher. What will 10 years bring? 50? What then might the soft limit look like? The only thing one can say with any probability is that it will tend towards the hard limit.
When I say Melee will need to adapt, this is one of the things I'm talking about. Nevermind that half the cast has little tourney representation at all because they're terrible or bugged. If the metagame stales and one or two characters maintain dominance over major placings for too long, then we lose out on the excitement of the all-star Nintendo cast, we lose out on rare and beautiful playstyles and interactions, and ultimately we will lose out on new community members who want a more balanced game. I genuinely don't know if Melee can survive something like this because even if the game could be patched, it probably wouldn't be because:
B. Melee Fanatics Are Obstinate
I once asked a prominent New York City TO whether Melee would benefit from a balance patch. He told me he’d rather have only the top four characters with the current settings than change a single thing to balance the rest of the cast. Melee is too sacred, even its less worthwhile aspects. Without getting into a whole thing about whether L-canceling adds depth, let’s just say that it becomes extremely linear when you realize you can spam light shield before you land without consequence. Rather than being a feature, it’s actually a safety valve. Without L-canceling the hard and soft limits are much closer together and Fox is very easily the best, rather than the character with the best results for the most work. Altering the inputs of Melee is blasphemy, but it may become necessary, because we now know that:
C. Melee Destroys Hands
As a classical guitarist I was lucky that I already knew the importance of taking care before performing lots of sharp, repetitive hand motions. Awareness of this issue and associated precautions are far more widespread than they've ever been. Other games also have this issue, however, because of its low payouts and high barrier to competitive entry, Melee is a high risk, low reward game to get into. This is the most pressing threat to continued growth.
We can't assume that new players will ever see Melee the way we do. Remember, fresh eyes. My generation played casual Melee, so competitive Melee looked like super heroics by comparison. This hasn't been the case for a while. Without recency OR nostalgia to aid us, the games that are more lucrative, less costly investments (in terms of time and health) will win out over Melee to be the big games of eSports. As a standalone, eternal game we are in an extremely unique position vis a vis player acquisition, and Melee has performed more than admirably in attracting new players, but we cannot overcome being a terrible investment, and waiting for our prize pools to make up the difference is some seriously passive play.
D. Nintendo
The wild card. Nintendo doesn't even act as logical as most corporations because their enormous cash reserves allow them to operate in the red for long periods of time. The potential for legal action against us is real, the threat of a divisive remake is real, and the communication between the community and the company has been mixed. Nintendo may ultimately help us more than they hurt, but there's no certainty. They have the power until we/they emancipate Melee.
In Conclusion
I stick to the saying that you don't present a problem without also presenting a solution. To take Melee to the next level, to immediately banish any doubt of its immortality, I propose we beat EVO in 2017 by putting on a bigger Melee tournament than they can (not at the same time, obviously). Beat EVO and we show the world that this game is bigger than the fighting game eSports niche it has settled into. The Melee community hasn't gotten together to do something really big in a while, which leads to:
E. Community Complacency
It hasn't happened yet, but I've seen signs. It's great to reflect on our accomplishments, to take pride in our victories, but we do that enough already and in order to keep signifying to the world and our sponsors that we're still the can-do community, we need to keep doing. Smashers are putting the sweat of their prime years into maintaining this dynamo, but they aren't enough to keep growing it by themselves. The only way Melee gets its century is if more TO's step up, build communities, replace the old guard, populate the world with new Melee players so that when Super Smash Con, or whatever becomes of Apex, or a brand new national series start their booking process, they're booking for 2,000 entrants, even 3,000. Once again, the only tested and proven method for keeping Melee alive through tough times is having an informed and active community ready to go on a moment's notice. Times aren't so tough now, so let's show the world what we can really do. We just have to watch out for:
F. Top Player Burnout
I'm pretty sure that's the next level. Let me know why I'm wrong below.
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This piece is purely the opinion of its author, and does not reflect the position of Smashboards or its affiliates. Additional shoutouts to NPR|Willie for his eyeballs, SmashCapps for taking an interest, and the whole NOLA crew.
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