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LOS ANGELES – On the opening day of the biggest annual convention of the video game industry, fans lined up for hours, then found themselves side by side in the # 39, huge Nintendo exhibition hall. Smash Bros. Ultimate. A little over one kilometer in the Belasco Theater, some of the best professional players in the world Smash Bros. participated in a rare invitational tournament organized by the company. Together, the events became the main topic of discussion at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, better known as E3, an exhibition that hosted more than 69,000 video players at the Los Angeles Convention Center during its three days of racing last month.
The demos and the tournament represent a huge Nintendo promotional promotion for the final episode of his Smash Bros. series, a fighting game that features some of Nintendo's most memorable characters, such as Mario, Link and Donkey Kong , in a battle to crush opponents off the screen. It also shows one of the most intriguing problems of the company: how will Nintendo reconcile the possibilities offered by the rise of esports with the company's long-standing apprehension towards gambling? competitive?
Like FIFA's FIFA ™ or first-person shooter games such as Activision's Call of Duty, the competitions use the latest versions of the franchise. Yet the Smash community is divided
The main competitive story of the game revolves around Super Smash Bros. Melee, a more technical and aggressive version that was released in 2002 on the Nintendo Game Cube. This title has attracted most of the most famous professional players of the game because of its more complex movements, which reward the most qualified players. Super Smash Bros. for Wii U (called Smash 4 by most fans) is a slower and more defensive version of the game that has been adopted by a younger crowd of players.
As a result, Nintendo failed to maximize its opportunity to promote its new title via the competitive circuit – as did titles like Street Fighter and Call of Duty. The practice is comparable to sporting goods companies featuring the latest innovations through sponsorship agreements with athletes in more established professional sports leagues. Melee's dynamic would be similar to Nike presenting a new high-performance basketball basketball only to see its best athletes in place of the vintage Air Jordans.
At this point, however, Nintendo has been relatively indifferent. While some companies have settled on a market that some projects estimate at $ 1.5 billion by 2020, Nintendo is reluctant to embrace the competitive game – even though Smash Bros. is one of the flagship titles of the world of esports.
The release of Ultimate, scheduled for early December, represents the latest opportunity for Nintendo to unite the competitive circuit with its casual audience, a challenge that returns to famed game designer Masahiro Sakurai, who led every episode of the Smash Bros. series Should it address the competitive circuit by increasing the tempo and complexity of the game or by promoting a more robust audience by making the game more accessible?
"When you talk about audience, I do not really think about the audience per se," Sakurai told the Washington Post via a translator before the game's unveiling at E3. "I feel like a game, in the end, it's about playing the game. But if we focus too much on the top players – or the audience – then the game is falsely too much on the plane. technique. "
The revered status of Smash Bros comes from the fact that it is easy to learn but difficult to master. And Sakurai has always adjusted the scales between ease and difficulty. As a result, some games have been more technical than others, causing a split in the competitive community. But both sides have strong ratings:
In 2017, in terms of audience and participants, the Melee and Smash 4 tournaments were comparable. According to market research firm Newzoo, Melee and Smash 4 rank respectively 11th and 12th in terms of audience, with a total of 16.8 million hours viewed on the streaming platform. own Amazon Twitch. (The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.)
Together, these audiences would rank the Smash franchise ninth, well above Capcom's Street Fighter V and below the Psyonix football game, Rocket League. It would also make Smash the best fighting game in the world in terms of the number of viewers.
Nintendo of America has slowly rallied to the competitive Smash community in recent years, badociating with tournaments to cover different costs and organize invitations. But Nintendo has not gone as far as Capcom with Street Fighter embracing esports. There is no tournament circuit sanctioned by Nintendo, and the company does not contribute to the prize pools of the tournament.
Nintendo provided no comment to The Post when asked for its official position towards the esports. Sakurai, who is not a Nintendo employee, gave his view on why the company did not show competitiveness.
"The philosophy behind them does not fit the philosophy of Nintendo, the prize money," Sakurai said. "They are coming to a point where they are playing the game for money, and I think that kind of direction does not coincide with Nintendo's vision of what games should be."
Sakurai is also a fan of Street Fighter, a game that has fully embraced esports. The publisher has a global tournament circuit that ends with the Capcom Cup, where the winner earns over $ 200,000 in prize money. Sony PlayStation is the title sponsor of the Pro Tour, but Red Bull and other tournament sponsors around the world have jumped in. Sakurai does not see such close links with the spies as problematic, but he believes that his approach with Smash opens the game
"That does not mean that Street Fighter fails [by more fully embracing competitive gaming] by any means, but personally, I think all games with controls are difficult, the creative side is trying to raise people who do that, "Sakurai said. "It does not beat a game where you press a button to create a special movement. I think it's really easy to take for a lot of people."
This philosophy has been rewarded on the sales front. Even with Capcom's engaged efforts on the esports scene, increasing its visibility on streaming platforms and in the media, Street Fighter V has managed to sell only 1.9 million dollars. since its release in February 2016. This is worthless compared to Smash 4, where the Wii U version has sold $ 5.1 million since September 2014, the 3DS version adding 8.2 million.
Twitter reported that Smash Bros was the most-tweeted subject of E3, which generated nearly 15 million tweets including the E3 hashtag. The buzz reached its peak at the Nintendo press conference with about 890,000 tweets for an hour on June 12.
This vigorous audience is why, while Sakurai has increased the tempo of the game in Ultimate, he has refrained from reinstating mechanics that has resonated so well with Melee's professional crowd. This includes "wave-dashing", a technique that gives the impression that the character slips, allowing the characters to quickly change positions, including sliding backwards, while continuing to confront their opponent.
But at the same time, I think a lot of players, on the other hand, have abandoned Melee because it's too technical, because they can not keep up, "said Sakurai." And I know that there were players who were suffering from tendonitis and who were playing so much with the controller … it's really hard for the player and I have the impression that one The game should really focus on what the target audience is. "[19659021NewNortheastyourcompetitivecompetitiveconsidercollectinganewfoundlandwideabouttransformingSmashen'scircuitneedownsputop10
" Our future hope with what we unveiled in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is us "I'd love to see Super Smash Bros. Ultimate being the new title defining Smash Bros. across the tournament space," said Reggie Fils-Aime, Nintendo of America's Operations Director, at On the occasion of E3
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