The organizers of the Smash World Tour have today announced that they will be shut down after Nintendo told them “without warning” that they “could no longer operate”.
The tripwhich is operated by a third party (since Nintendo has traditionally been so bad at it) had become one over the years of the biggest in the esports and fighting games scene. As the SWT team says:
In 2022 alone, we connected over 6,400 live events worldwide with over 325,000 in-person attendees, making the Smash World Tour (SWT or the Tour) the largest esports tour in history for any game title. The championships would also have had the largest prize pool in Smash history at over $250,000. The 2023 Smash World Tour should have a prize pool of over $350,000.
That’s all toast, however, as organizers now say, “Without warning, the night before Thanksgiving, we received word from Nintendo that we could no longer work.” While Nintendo is yet to comment – we’ve reached out to the company –Nintendo recently teamed up with Panda to host a series of competing officially licensed products smashed
While this will be a disappointment to SWT organisers, fans and players, it has also left the team in a huge financial hole with so many bookings and plans already being made for the events. As they say in the cancellation notice:
We don’t yet know where everything will end up with deals, sponsorships, etc – in short, we’ll lose hundreds of thousands of dollars because of Nintendo’s actions. That being said, we are taking steps to address many of the issues that have resulted from the cancellation of the upcoming Smash World Tour Championships – particularly for players. Please keep an eye out for travel planning assistance in the coming days. Given the schedule we were forced into, we had to release this statement before we could iron out all the details. All participants will receive a full refund.
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The move surprised the SWT team, who had believed it would gradually make progress after years of friction with Nintendo:
In November 2021, after the Panda Cup was first announced, Nintendo contacted us to place a call with some of their team, including a representative from their legal department. We really thought we might be shut down given that they now had a licensed rival track and a partner in Panda.
When we joined the call we were very surprised to hear exactly the opposite.
Nintendo reached out to us to say that they’ve been watching us build over the years and wanted to see if we were interested in collaborating With them and pursuing a license as well. They made it clear that Panda’s partnership is not exclusive, and they said it “didn’t go unnoticed” that we didn’t infringe on their intellectual property regarding game mods and represented Nintendo’s values well. They made it clear that game mods were their primary concern in terms of “event shutdowns,” which also made sense to us given their enforcement of this in recent years.
This lengthy conversation changed our perspective on Nintendo at a macro level; It was incredibly refreshing to speak to several senior team members and clear up many misunderstandings and concerns over the years. We explained why so many in the community were reluctant to reach out to Nintendo to work together, and we felt strongly that Nintendo was taking a close look at their relationship with the community and ways to make a positive contribution.
Guess not! Except that Nintendo now mandates that tournaments can only take place with an official license – something SWT wasn’t successful in applying – the team also claim that Panda undermined them with the organizers of individual events (the World Tour would have been an umbrella tying them together) and that Nintendo continued to say nice things to their faces, Panda had informed these Grassroost organizers that the Smash World Tour would definitely be cancelled, which made them hesitant to come on board.
You can read the full announcement herewhich is much more detailed and concludes with an appeal “that Nintendo reconsiders how its relationship with the Smash community and its partners is currently going”.