Evo co-founder Joey Cuellar has revealed that Nintendo didn’t just want to stop Smash Bros. Melee being streamed from this year’s fighting game competition, they wanted to stop that part of the tournament taking place altogether.
“They were not only trying to shut down the stream”, he told OneMoreGameTV, “they were trying to shut down the event, the Smash portion of the event”.
It was only when Evo’s organisers “wig-wammed their way through” conversations with the company’s legal department that Nintendo agreed to only go after the streaming portion of the event (a decision they later reversed).
We’re still waiting on comment from Nintendo of America over the matter, and will update if we hear back.
Live On Three E166 [OneMoreGameTV, via Polygon]
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14 responses to “Nintendo Wanted Smash Bros. Pulled From World’s Biggest Tournament”
NO WE DON’T EVEN WANT YOUR FREE EXPOSURE AND PUBLICITY. WHO CARES IF WE JUST ANNOUNCED A NEW SMASH BROS ON OUR STRUGGLING CONSOLE AND COULD REALLY BENEFIT FROM THE INTEREST GENERATED BY THE WORLDS BIGGEST FIGHTING GAME EVENT.
I hope you held down shift for all of this, BECAUSE IT’S YELLING HARDER!
WHAT!?
And to think… I was going to buy the WiiU from these assholes!
True but there must of been a reason behind it all I dibs the illuminati
I suspect it might have something to do with the fact that SSBM is an older game, and they may have preferred them playing the newer iteration, SSBB instead.
Perhaps they should’ve spent more time making a good third game then 😛
There’s not much wrong with SSBB honestly, apart from the fact your character can randomly slip over. Which, to be fair, isn’t something you’d want to happen when you’re playing in a big tournament with money on the line.
It’s also floatier and slower-paced. Heck, Sakurai even said that it was more aimed at casuals than anything else.
My first guess as to why they wouldn’t want this is because it also counts as “promotional material”, which also means it’s being promoted by the players. But if the players are nothing but swearing, hooting dickholes, who think it’s a requirement for women to show their feet to guys with a foot fetish at any and all times, then how do you think that image will hold up next to their brand?
seriously, how can one company be so out of touch with the internet?
It’s a pretty weird thing for Nintendo to do. I wonder if they were planning on doing their own tournament and wanted to make sure it got all the limelight.
Way too benevolent an assumption. More likely? It’s a giant corporation and it takes time for thoughts to make their way up from the limbs to the lizard brain.
Legal basically has one purpose. Attack and defend. Everything is combat to them. Legal got to this one first and started attacking, per their purpose, before marketing/PR gland kicked in and started sending, “Nonono! Stop that!” signals to the Legal antibodies.
I took it this way too… they should be sitting working out a deal with the marketing department not the legal department. I bet there are as many idiot managers at nintendo as there are at EA.
But it’s Nintendo. You can’t talk like that about Nintendo. Next thing you tell me is that Disney is all about the money.
great comment. add it to the comments hall of fame
As a Nintendo fanboi, lately Nintendo have been doing alot of things that make it harder to defend them in flame wars on forums these days.
I don’t know how much of Evo and Nintendo’s relationship has been made public, but it could boil down to a poor relationship.
It could also boil down to wanting to control their i.p. which is well within their rights. Nintendo has seen Microsoft flail and retreat with their new ideas and see that the WiiU isn’t doing fantastically, the last thing they need is some other company holding a tournament and giving Nintendo some form of bad publicity for the rest of the world to run with. Whilst I agree it’s stupid, we’ve just seen a console die because of bad publicity, Nintendo don’t want anything to do with that
Japanese companies are extremely strict with copyright related stuff (to the point of censoring brands in the background during TV shows) so it could at least in part of that, the strict guidelines nobody has the will/courage to change (Japanese business in a nutshell). While I’m sure the American and European arms would be fine with it the Japanese home office would have the final say with the guidelines.