In the last couple weeks, the Super Smash Bros. community experienced its own #MeToo movement as allegations of widespread abuse and sexual misconduct came to light. Victims spoke out against many prominent professional players, popular personalities, and even a tournament organizer. More disturbingly, many of the victims were underage at the time of their incidents. Some of the accused have since confessed to and apologized for their misdeeds. The situation is continuing to unfold and can be followed at various outlets, such as Twitter or Reddit.
As the publisher of the wildly popular fighting game series, however, Nintendo should also be scrutinized for how their lack of active involvement in the Smash competitive community may have contributed to the abuse of their most vulnerable players. In response to the recent events, Nintendo released the following statement to the media:
“We are deeply disturbed by the allegations raised against certain members of the competitive gaming community. They are absolutely impermissible.”
But given Nintendo’s historic lack of enthusiasm toward their own game’s competitive community, this statement comes across as somewhat hollow and generic. Nintendo may publicly condemn statutory rape as “impermissible,” but it is difficult to imagine the company being able to enforce any kind of meaningful consequence onto abusers, much less take preemptive actions before young lives are ruined.
The popularity of Nintendo’s game attracts an extremely diverse crowd, including children. Fans come into contact with each other at tournaments, which serve as both competitive and social events. Before the recent revelations of rampant abuse, Nintendo “opting to watch from afar,” as ESPN’s Wynton Smith puts it, was simply a poor business decision. Now, it has become an ethical obligation for Nintendo to finally take an active role among its own community to protect its most vulnerable members.
The Brief History of an Accidental eSport
Nintendo’s situation today can be traced back to a series of decisions the company made since 2002. The first Super Smash Bros. was released for the Nintendo 64 in 1999 to international commercial success, but it was the 2001 sequel, Super Smash Bros. Melee for GameCube, that created Smash as the eSport we know today. The following year, a competitive scene sprung up organically around the game as organizers in the community created events for the top players to compete against each other and for fans to watch high-level play and meet like-minded friends.
In the meantime however, Nintendo made no effort to organize or even sponsor any Melee tournaments. In fact, Nintendo initially showed hostility towards the eSports scene of Melee. Game creator Masahiro Sakurai lamented that competitive play strayed from his original vision for the Smash Bros. series, and Melee’s 2008 sequel, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, was designed to favor casual over competitive play. In 2013, Nintendo sent a cease-and-desist letter to a major tournament to block Melee competition. Free exposure to over 100,000 people would otherwise be any marketer’s dream, but for Nintendo, it took heavy public backlash for them to finally retract the order.
Nintendo gradually warmed the following year to the competitive community. In 2014, to promote the next generation of Smash for the 3DS handheld and WiiU, Nintendo hosted its first ever tournament for the game, inviting professional players to play Smash 4 in front of 3,000 fans. Then only in 2015 would they officially sponsor a community Smash tournament for the first time — a full thirteen years after Melee fans first started organizing tournaments among themselves.
Outside of Smash, none of Nintendo’s other games (such as the Mario Kart series) developed a significant competitive scene, nor did Nintendo attempt to develop a new eSport. Even from a purely business standpoint, Nintendo’s stubborn reluctance to invest in eSports is puzzling. The contrast is stark when compared to other publishers who heavily invest in cultivating an eSports scene for their games, such as Activision Blizzard with its Overwatch and Call of Duty Leagues. Nintendo has also never contributed to the prize pool of a Smash tournament, while Epic Games committed $100 million in prize money to Fortnite in 2019 alone.
Nintendo and Smash Bros. in 2020
The current iteration of the game, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, is the best-selling fighting game of all time, with nearly 19 million units sold as of March 2020. On the eSports side, Ultimate achieved a record high tournament viewership in August 2019 of over 279,000 concurrent viewers. However, as recently as January 2020, Nintendo has continued to defend its decision to not invest in eSports. When asked about the continued unwillingness to support Smash tournaments with prize money, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa doubled down on his company’s strategy (translation by Kotaku):
It’s not that we’re opposed to [eSports]. So that our games can be widely enjoyed by anyone regardless of experience, gender, or age, we want to be able to participate in a wide range of different events. Our strength, what differentiates us from other companies, is this different worldview, not an amount of prize money.
Next came the Covid-19 global crisis, presenting a unique series of challenges and opportunities for eSports. Unlike traditional sports, eSports tournaments can proceed as per usual under lockdown as long as viewers, commentators, and players have a stable Internet connection. A population trapped at home rekindled their interest in gaming and explored new forms of online entertainment. According to Activate’s report, 30% of eSports audiences during lockdown were first-time watchers, so this was a prime opportunity for Nintendo to promote Smash as an eSport to an attentive audience. For example, when stay-at-home orders throughout North America forced in-person tournaments to cancel, Nintendo could have stepped up to organize an official online tournament with a large prize pool to attract talent, a move that would not only attract attention to the Smash franchise from the wider market, but also generate much-needed goodwill among its competitive community. An official online tournament would have been a logistically straightforward and low-cost move that would not have diverted resources from their concurrent Animal Crossing: New Horizons rollout.
However, Nintendo unfortunately chose to do nothing for Smash eSport fans during lockdown, not even acknowledging the various tournament series that successfully moved online. In fact, during this time, Smash as an eSport was hurt again by a past decision of Nintendo’s. Neither the Switch nor its dock includes a port for an Ethernet cable, which is a business decision in line with the company’s aversion towards catering to competitive play. Wireless connections are less stable than wired connections, so in an interesting twist, the Smash Ultimate meta strategies shifted to play around potential lag. The resulting slow-paced, “camping” style of play was extremely dull to spectate and caused resentment from viewers towards players who picked the offending character, Sonic, in online tournaments. This is an interesting example of what seems to now be a butterfly effect of unintended consequences following Nintendo’s “allergy” towards eSports.
Next Steps for Nintendo
Unfortunately for Nintendo, the abuse allegations of July 2020 have changed the gravity of the problem. Before, it was a matter of lost revenue opportunities, which may have been trivial in Nintendo’s financial projections compared to the sheer number of sales of the games. But as the trite saying goes: “with great power comes great responsibility.” The popularity of Smash has become a great responsibility for Nintendo to shoulder.
Smash events attract fans of all demographics, spanning socioeconomic status, gender, race, sexual orientation, and age. This diversity can be seen at both the local level, such as tournaments held in NYC by Community Gaming New York (CGNY), and at the highest level, such as the Evo Championship Series, which draws thousands of Smash competitors each year. In this diverse community, some people achieve popularity with highly skilled play while others do so by producing entertaining videos and streams. But in an unfortunate similarity with many other social environments, some of those who gain power and popularity then abuse this social power and apparent immunity over other, more vulnerable members of the community. For Smash, this is particularly egregious as the community includes many underage minors as potential victims. Unbeknownst to the mainstream audience and perhaps Nintendo, abuse of this kind has been rampant in the Smash community for years and it was only brought to light this month. This hopefully will behoove Nintendo to finally act.
In the last 18 years of professional Smash, Nintendo has been completely absent as a unifying authority. This means there are no behavioral guidelines or community standards to enforce like other eSports publishers have been able to do for their respective communities. Taking direct logistical control over the major tournaments can be a first strong step towards managing the interactions between fans and their heroes. The fragmented nature of the Smash scene means that it is difficult, unfair, and perhaps unwise for any one third party tournament organizer to create and then enforce behavioral guidelines on one of the most diverse playerbases of any eSport. Even if they somehow accomplish this, abusers can simply wait until the next event to find new victims and continue grooming them.
Obviously, a central authority figure has not been able to solve every problem and at times, can be a source of problems themselves, as we see from Riot Games’ example. But though they are still far from perfect, Riot Games’ strong control over League of Legends’ professional circuits and championship tournaments encompasses the eSports organizations that rent a spot in the circuit, extending behavioral accountability to fan events and professional player interactions outside of officially sanctioned events as well. With a decades-long track record of strong industry reputation and consumer respect, Nintendo is well-positioned to step up to become a leader in safely managing an eSports community that includes underage minors. Today, leadership is not just an option for Nintendo, but an ethical obligation.
Conclusion
Since the birth of Melee’s competitive scene in 2002, Nintendo has been lukewarm at best towards the beloved eSport that it unintentionally created. Today, Smash is the envy of both gaming and eSports businesses. As a retail game, Ultimate has shipped nearly 19 million copies at a retail price of $60, with two DLC packs at $25 and $30 for additional purchases. As an eSport, it has continued to enrapture an audience base of hundreds of thousands even two years after initial release, which continues to drive further sales of the game and its DLC, all with Nintendo barely needing to lift a logistical finger.
Recent events though have brought to light the widespread abusive behaviors of some of the community’s powerful. Although earnings from the eSports side of Smash may just be a blip next to Nintendo’s nearly $11 billion USD of earnings, company executives need to now see their indifference to eSports as not just a revenue issue but an ethical issue. With many of the victims including underage children, it is more critical than ever for Nintendo to finally give back to their Smash community and protect its most enthusiastic fans.
