For many years, Nintendo has been indifferent to the Super Smash Brothers championship. Now it has announced a new partnership with Nintendo, and the first officially authorized smash championship series will debut for the first time.
The news was released through a surprising press release on Thursday morning. Nintendo has cooperated with Detroit based E-sports brand Panda Global to create an unnamed championship track for Nintendo switch and its super smash bros.ultimate players of super smash bros.melee, the predecessor of GameCube in 2001.
Bill trinen, senior director of product marketing of Nintendo, wrote in a press release: “the cooperation with Panda Global is the next step for Nintendo to strive to create a more consistent, interesting and popular competitive environment for our players and fans.”. “We are proud to stand with organizations like panda global to celebrate and support the growing competitive super smash brother community, and create a space where all players can test and hone their competitive skills.”
At present, the unnamed track plan is limited to the United States. Once “Panda Global and Nintendo believe that international travel and participating in the event in person are allowed”, Canadian and Mexican players are eligible to enter. Meanwhile, players from the United States will participate in the qualification competition online.
Nintendo and Panda Global have not disclosed the events, schedule and potential bonus pool of the arena, but promise to do so “in the future”
Nintendo in general, this is an amazing face. Traditionally, Nintendo has been holding smash Championships at a certain distance from its opponents. At best, it basically ignores the scene; In the worst case, it closed the main game and issued stop and termination orders, just as it did for the online big house in November 2020, reportedly because it planned to use the fan modified version of Super Smash Brothers melee.
This is very different from what many of Nintendo’s peers are doing. For example, WB games is the publisher of the last three games in the mortal snapshot series. It has participated in a large number of competitions in MKX in 2015 and MK 11 in 2019, so that many sites on its track have been recognized, if not organized by WB itself.
In contrast, smash has a huge competitive scene, but it uses a series of unofficial rules and modifications to play smash, which is very different from Nintendo’s original intention. Smash’s competition rule set is actually the largest user creation mode in the game. It disables many functions of the game and occasionally uses faults or even deliberately damages the hardware to enable completely different games.
This may explain Nintendo’s lack of interest in Pro smash circuit, which was largely developed without Nintendo’s investment. However, this in turn created a culture with little official supervision, which eventually led to a series of allegations of sexual misconduct and shocked the scene in 2020.
With the official completion of smash ultimate, this is a strange but appropriate time for Nintendo to intervene and participate in the organization scene. Although Nintendo has not made any announcement about the operation of its professional smash track, it is certain that it will at least involve age restrictions for players and participants.