I like fan creations and also think Nintendo should leverage fan relationships. However, what is being asked is to let folks do things that BY LAW aren’t allowed. Random people who do not have credentials of any sort, to handle some of the most profitable IP on the planet.
It may make Nintendo look bad, but can you blame them entirely? When you put things into perspective, yes, it sucks, but I find it to be entirely expected.
While I do agree that one can't blame them entirely, there's a major counterpoint to be made that Nintendo's not handled the situation well enough to warrant the benefit of the doubt. The response has been very much emotional, yes (it's telling when prominent Melee players are outright calling for mutiny), but the relationship's between Nintendo and the hardcore Melee fandom specifically has always been chilly at best. This chillyness has started to spread to the competitive Ultimate, Splatoon and ARMS communities recently too, partly because they see Nintendo's support as way too insufficient.
The competitive Melee scene is and has always been 100 % grassroots - they've also had a strong independent streak because the first decade or so of its existence was without Nintendo even raising a peep officially. There's always been a strong undercurrent of them staying independent because of that. But the pandemic did effectively force an online solution.
Several prominent Smashers have argued that Nintendo does not have people "on the ground floor" so to speak taking pulse of what the fan communities are doing. I'm inclined to believe that since Nintendo's actions have mostly been on the legal / marketing side. They do have several prominent Smashers as Brand Ambassadors (one reason I don't think they'll leave the scene entirely), but there's not been any real leveraging here.
Had Nintendo been more active here, they could've mitigated the situation by hosting limited tournaments or whatever else. Instead, well, the recent allegations about them undermining potential circuits do not help, since that fuels the calls for mutiny.
At first I agreed; nothing would come of it, Nintendo would shrug it off. But seeing them act like big slimy babies over the Splatoon 2 fiasco kind of had me feeling otherwise. It was clearly a response and not only that, a really pathetic and cowardly one. "Executional challenges"? Really? Showed to me something I didn't think was going on; that this is getting to them.
Yeah, that's where the the recent uproar has landed a bodyblow on Nintendo. I'll give context since there'll be people who did not hear of that (or all of it). The blow is not enourmous, but consider that the
prizepool for the NA Open was this:
- The team ranked 1st will receive the Grand Prize - Each member from one (1) Grand Prize Winning Team will each receive a Splatoon 2 North American Open December 2020 Champion Trophy (ARV $200 US each)
- The teams ranked 2nd –4th will receive the First Prize - Each member from three (3) First Prize Winning Teams will each receive a Splatoon 2 North American Open December 2020 Top 4 Trophy (ARV $150 US each)
- The teams ranked 5th – 8th will receive the Second Prize - Each member from four (4) Second Prize Winning Teams will each receive 2,500 My Nintendo Gold Points (ARV $25 US each)
Total I believe is $3750.
Problem is, the trophies don't help to pay the bills, so they've garnered a reputation as practically worthless. And thus the whole "Nintendo only offers Gold Points" assertion was born. So when the livestream was cancelled over the "Executional Challenges"... the Top 4 teams went on to organize the Squid House on the day the NA Online Open's livestream was supposed to take place and joined that instead together with the Splatoon stream producers EndGameTV. The rest of the Top 8 simply quit and the NA Online Open didn't finish.
So a Splatoon Online Open was cancelled and the tournament that replaced it raised $28K through crowdfunding, with $3K of that going to charity since the tournament had a $25K cap. Prominent Smashers and Splatoon members helped fund this, and I believe I saw Youtubers like ChuggaConroy also contribute money towards the Squid House. If one counts the trophies as having its advertised value, then the Squid House had ca. 6-7 times more money involved than the NA Online Open.
It's not a huge setback for Nintendo, no. But it's a warning that their methods of handling competitive events are not working as they intended, and there's a real demand from pro players for something other than Gold Points and trophies. Money is crucial to competitive scenes because players (and others involved in the scenes like EndGameTV) gotta pay the bills somehow. And as long as Nintendo's not budging and allegations about them undermining the scenes continue to swirl around (not helped by this)... those people are going to look elsewhere. It's the case with Ludwig Ahgren, who's hosting his own Slippi charity tournament right on the date the Big House was supposed to take place and has garnered more than $50K so far. Smaller third party orgs are ready and willing to fill and grow the void.
The thing is, Nintendo does not want to completely ignore e-sports either. They've used it continously for marketing (and this is one aspect of the allegations, that Nintendo's only slapped ads onto tournaments and undermined efforts to grow the competitive scenes in more subtle areas, such as denying tournament circuits). So them losing one NA Online Open is not that big of a deal, but what if it continues? Then it might become slightly more of an issue. Don't get me wrong, it's not going to be enourmously disasterous for Nintendo, but it's still something they'd not want to see continue I'd imagine.
Sure, 95 % of a game's playerbase is not going to care that much about what happens in the competitive scene (this is the case for LoL too, which is the game most associated with that), but competitive people are often also prominent voices and can reach a lot of the 95 %. Which compounds the PR issue further for Nintendo - they'll have to deal with people who are very influential to their scenes and are now angry at Nintendo for past events.
I'll end on this note:
I really, really doubt Nintendo is going to backtrack on any of their recent claptrap. However... I don't think that makes this whole thing a waste of time. Flaming Nintendo is a means to a probably unreachable end, yes. But, it's also a pretty nice end in and of itself, when people are angry and upset.
I really doubt they'll backtrack any time soon, but if they start to lose ad space / control over the situation outlined above, I could see them moving or even backtracking. They'll not budge regarding Slippi due to how they view the IP situation (but that might mean that the Melee community will go start their own Slippi circuit with blackjack and hookers) or mods, but I could see them backtracking a bit on in-person Melee / Smash tournaments. The pro Smash players are likely going to be adamant about a circuit, and that's one concession Nintendo might make now that cat's out of the bag on that.
One of the problem for Nintendo now is that this has spread to the Splatoon scene - a scene Nintendo toots their own horn about - so they might backtrack there too. Not saying it's certain they'll backtrack - it isn't - but there is a chance now that the issue has gotten bigger than Nintendo intended it to be.
In regards to the topic of legality, I guess I can understand Nintendo going against TBH for “piracy reasons” and TBH complying because they don’t want to bother checking to see if everyone has a copy that’s of their own disc or not, if they even can.
Though, since they may not be able to prove it, I still think Nintendo’s reasoning is bullcrap. And modding games for your own use is also legal, as established in the Nintendo v. Galoob case, not to mention that Slippi is a modded Dolphin emulator anyway and idk if it even injects any code into your Melee iso.
IIRC Slippi itself doesn't, but includes previously existing mods like UCF and the UnclePunch training pack. UnclePunch himself is also a part of the Slippi dev team.
While I haven't watched it myself, GameXplain uploaded their predictions for The Game Awards, and they talk about the possibility of Fighter 8.
Based on the video description, they also talk about BOTW2 and Metroid Prime.
The character what was discussed the most was Crash (incl. a hypotheoretical stage appearance).
Overall it's very difficult to say how TGA will turn out - there's absolutely a chance that FP8 won't be revealed there. Still, it is certainly possible that TGA could come along with a character announcement. I'm not going to commit to exact percantage chances because
(now with online co-op too).
