Comment by mxwsn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mxwsn | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not so sure that "smush" is going to be the capstone you're describing. Of course, details are slim and hype is high right now, but I think there are a few factors to keep in mind. As a competitive melee player, Nintendo has proven themselves to be incredibly slow and remains out of date with regard to supporting a competitive community for any game they have. They do seem to be trying to turn a new leaf with Ultimate, but Nintendo Japan has a lot of internal inertia (Sakurai's personal opinions) and regulatory restrictions (gambling laws making it hard to host tournaments with meaningful prize money) that make me skeptical that they're going to go as far to support their game as Valve, Riot, Blizzard, etc, which is what's really necessary to become a tier 1 e-sport. These leading e-sport companies are all American, in contrast to Nintendo which has to work overseas to support smash competitively (the Japanese competitive smash community is tiny compared to the U.S., in part due to culture).

In addition, I don't think Nintendo's going to be able to kill melee and convert all of us to ultimate without also turning off lots of casuals. But without the full support of both casuals and the entire existing competitive community for smash (over half of which is for melee), ultimate is just going to be another profitable and fun game, like smash 4, but not lastingly legendary like melee happened to be.

I am definitely suffering from smush hype delirium, I won't even try to deny it. And I think your skepticism is well placed. I would be surprised (pleasantly) to see Nintendo offering anything close to Riot, Valve, Blizzard levels of support within this decade. Still it feels like they've gone from actively hostile toward the competitive scene in Brawl, to throwing us a few bones in Sm4sh (omega modes, new run of Gamecube controllers, albeit slightly funky ones) to finally at least considering the pro scene as first class citizens in Smush.

That being said I don't really say a way that it could kill Melee either... although I bet melee players are going to buy a lot of controllers. The only thing I could imagine killing Melee is maybe if Smush had a Melee compatibility mode that implemented its mechanics exactly faithful to the original, but I don't see them doing that, and even then people probably still wouldn't leave Melee.

I just want to note that Capcom, another Japanese company, has managed to make Street Fighter an Esport starting with Ultra Street Fighter 4 in 2014 and continuing now with Street Fighter 5. They did this by having a qualifying circuit for their Capcom cup tournament at the end of the year which had a prize of $250k for 1st place. It's nowhere as big as the 3 you mentioned, but I think that's mostly due to size of the scene.

These leading e-sport companies are all American, in contrast to Nintendo which has to work overseas to support smash competitively (the Japanese competitive smash community is tiny compared to the U.S., in part due to culture).

How successful any multiplayer game will be is a thorny question, so I think you are more likely to end up right than the gp. Established properties can suddenly go bust. Fast followers on hot trends can reap all the rewards. Multiplayer brawlers are essentially a one-series phenomenon (SSB) that has had spotty popularity. If I had to guess, I would bet that SSBU will be about as popular as Splatoon 2.

The problem with your logic is that Tekken, Street Fighter and now Dragonball Fighter Z, all made by Japanese developers, are the top fighting games on Twitch. Their popularity is much lower than PUBG/LOL/Fortnite/etc but I would submit that fighting games are simply punishing to get into - it's very difficult for a newbie to find a niche as a support character as is possible in many team games, for example. Furthermore, character balance/competitiveness issues are magnified by the 1 v 1 focus.

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