Dear Reader:
Nintendo wants to keep the Smash Bros. tournament scene at a grassroots level
Coming from Reggie Fils-Aime...
“I love passionate Smash fans.
We’ve been in this social competitive space for a long time. Smash Bros. Melee has been a mainstay in the competitive gaming space for a long time. What we’re doing—and our take on his space is we want to encourage the community. We want to enable them to put on tournaments and to have fun and for the players themselves to participate in these types of situations. That’s our view of this space.
I will say this. Five, six, seven years ago, as we engaged with our developers and talked to them about Smash Bros. and what was happening, there was not a lot of understanding about this space. And it’s been people like [Nintendo of America’s] Bill Trinen and JC Rodrigo and all of these folks who understand the space that have helped us educate our company and educate our developers around the benefits of engaging with the community and empowering and enabling this to happen. It was with the most recent Smash Bros. that we’ve done more tournaments and we’re supporting both the Melee community as well as the Smash Bros. Wii U community and they’re both vibrant and are continuing to grow.
It’s community-oriented. It’s enabling the community to drive it forward. We have relationships, obviously, with entities like Evo and Battlefly. We want to do this much more at a grassroots level than others’ visions around leagues and big up-front payments and things of that nature.”