Nintendo Cancels Livestreams for Splatoon 2 North American Open

Recent allegations have surfaced that Nintendo has, allegedly, suppressed the advancement of the Smash competitive community. These allegations have been highlighted in an article published by the Smashboards news team. This all came about after the online version of Big House was cancelled following a Cease & Desist order by Nintendo due to their use of Slippi, an online alternative for Super Smash Bros. Melee. Following this, several hashtags like #FreeMelee and #SaveSmash were created to help support the community and represent frustration against Nintendo.

As a way of showing support, the competitive Splatoon and ARMS community have voiced concerns about Nintendo’s actions against the Smash community and their own experiences working with the company. Specifically, Nintendo’s involvement in official ARMs tournaments have been criticized.

Nintendo has been largely silent regarding these allegations and made no effort to explain their decisions but, perhaps, they did make a statement in the form of recent actions against the Splatoon community. According to sources, Nintendo has cancelled their live-streams for the Splatoon 2 North American Open.

So the Splatoon community, in support of the Smash community, has 30% of the top teams in this weekend's Spl2 NA Open with Team names in support of Melee and Smash.
So what does @NintendoAmerica @NintendoVS do in response?
They cancelled their livestream for tomorrow's Finals.

— Level1 | Slimy (@SlimyQuagsire) December 5, 2020

Further evidence in the Twitter thread has been provided by the user. It’s pretty shocking to learn that 30% of the users showing support for #SaveSmash and #FreeMelee caused live-streams for its finals to be cancelled. It’s currently unknown if the finals will be broadcasted at another date but its relation to the current situation in the Smash competitive community is uncanny.

What do you think about this given situation? Do you think Nintendo should support their competitive communities? Do you think they have been acting poorly? Let us know below.

Credits:
Graphics: @Zerp
Social Media: @Scribe

 

You can still do IRL tournaments with Melee though, that's never been an issue.

It is during a pandemic, which is the reason they wanted to use Slippi to begin with.

Not trying to justify the TOs here, they should've known Nintendo would hate this based on previous instances of mods in tournaments like UCF and they should've stopped when asked to instead of flipping off a middle finger to the big N, but it's still a fairly good enough reason to look into a mod that adds online play for the tournament.

 

Nobody in this case gives a single Diddy Kong down throw into up air combo over FrEe SpEeCh because it's completely irrelevant.

I beg to differ.

 

It is selfish of this whole Free Melee thing to cause the cancellation of a tournament. There were better ways to get the message across than to do that.

 

It is selfish of this whole Free Melee thing to cause the cancellation of a tournament. There were better ways to get the message across than to do that.

I think the word you're looking for is petty, but yes, it's honestly really petty to do that.

 

It is during a pandemic, which is the reason they wanted to use Slippi to begin with.

For sure the pandemic puts everybody in a weird situation. Which is also probably a factor in all of this: Nintendo has a paid online service for their most recent iteration of the game, and therefore they "lose" out on people paying for that service if they use other software that allows online gaming. And then again: how many people would have actually gone to an IRL tournament to play Melee? It's really not that many people overall, and probably not worth for Nintendo to turn a blind eye on this software. If they let it pass, it will be used for other games of theirs, and their image could go down with it. It's a risk, but they've always worked hard against this type of things. Even if people want to suddenly play online Diddy Kong Racing, it won't happen through fan-made stuff.