It’s a good thing Nintendo didn’t follow through with its reported attempts to ban streams of Smash Bros. Melee from this year’s Evo fighting game tournament. Because it just became, for the time being at least, the biggest fighting game stream of all time.
At its peak during the game’s finals held earlier today, over 100,000 people were watching the Melee portion of Evo go down, which Evo co-founder Tom Cannon says makes it “the most watched fighting game in history”.
I’m sure the numbers were helped by the mess surrounding the game’s inclusion in the first place – it’s a game that’s over a decade old and only made the tournament following a poll – but whatever. Whoever at Nintendo tried to implement the ban in the first place probably feels even smaller today.
The rest of Evo is still going down; you can catch the live streams here.
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11 responses to “Smash Bros. Survives Ban, Becomes Biggest Fighting Stream In History”
I imagine that record is going to be broken pretty soon today.
It wasn’t just Smash that got the numbers, this Evo has been fantastic.
Yeah your tweets got me watching, it’s crazy exciting at times with the crowd really getting into it. I feel like I can only understand and follow Street Fighter IV though – I’m unfamiliar with most of the other games, and MvC3 in particular is so fast and flashy that I have no idea what’s happening – you really have to be a bit familiar with the game to get the most out of it. Gotta check out those Smash Bros games though (the only other game I’ve really played), feels like that’ll be silly fun to watch.
My arcade stick sits there, dusty and unused for so long, if work wasn’t squishing me into paste I’d back on SFIV getting my ass handed to me right now.
If you were just watching, you just saw something absolutely amazing. Justin Wong should not have been able to do that.
Yeah, as I said, I don’t understand MvC, but the announcers and the crowd made it obvious what an amazing comeback that was. Even at the end I thought the other guy could just hold on till the clock went down, and then it flipped in the last 3 seconds, crazy exciting.
I don’t understand the time/sched though, is SFIV final coming up later?
In essence, Justin Wong is the “best” American fighting game player. Chris G is the best Marvel player. Chris G’s team is built around laming people out. Basically being impossible to attack thanks to Morrigan and Doctor Doom.
Justin was opportunistically taking down Doom whenever he got called out for an assist but that wasn’t working.
Then he made that comeback with Storm.
Then he made another comeback with Akuma. Admittedly, Akuma can stall out Vergil if he has super meter, which is exactly what happened.
And yeah, SF4 is next. They’re doing a special announcement where they reveal a new character for the next version of the game and then it’s time for top 8.
Street Fighter always gets pride of place at Evo.
Awesome thanks. It’s just the game I spent all my coins on as a kid so I have a lot of nostalgia based love for it.
That game was god damn insane. Down to almost a pixel and manages to start the reversal on ChrisG
In case anyone cares, there were nearly 150000 people watching the Marvel vs Capcom 3 finals. I think it’s safe to call that the record.
Dat Mahvel
With regards to the imposed ban, Nintendo really needs to review its legal department (and just their attitudes towards online as a company in general), whether it be HQ or NOA who are making these decisions. Their crusade against fan delivered online content has just been stupid and this is coming from someone who has only ever owned Nintendo consoles, not that that fact really matters.