Smash Bros. Fans Are In Uproar As New Guidelines Threaten Community Tournaments

25.10.2023 - 00:47 / thegamer.com / New

Super Smash Bros. fans are pretty used to getting dirty looks from Nintendo, especially the Super Smash Bros. Melee scene. Nintendo has been consistently made setting up Melee tournaments more and more difficult recently, emposing strict guidelines and rules that many local organizers have had to skirt around for the past few years. However, this new set of guidelines recently released by Nintendo threatens to wipe out local Melee community tournaments for good.

Released by all major Nintendo Twitter accounts earlier today, these new guidelines contain a number of new rules that threaten to completely upend how community tournaments are run. While there are many questionable decisions, the two major issues that Smash Bros. fans are up in arms about are the new strict limits as to how many people can enter a tournament, and how much money a tournament organizer can make.

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According to these guidelines, only a maximum of 200 people are allowed to compete at in-person tournaments, while that number is increased to 300 for online tournamens. For organizers that wish to hold tournaments that include more than the maximum number, Nintendo is now making them hold several smaller tournaments, and then put on a winners bracket instead. Nintendo has even banned highschool charity tournaments unless the school itself gets permission. No, that's not a joke.

Nintendo also appears to be stopping community tournaments from making any kind of profit, stressing that organizers are only allowed to make enough money for tournament upkeep and prize pools. Community tournaments are no longer allowed to "generate commercial revenue", even going so far as to ban the sale of food, beverages and merchandise on the premises. How it plans to actually enforce that rule is beyond the understanding of most normal people.

If all of that wasn't bad enough, Smash Bros. Melee fans have a much more significant reason to panic. Nintendo also states that any tournaments that include a game with online play must go through Nintendo servers, which restricts Smash Bros. Melee tournaments to in-person events since it doesn't have built-in online features. Modified software is also banned, meaning popular mods such as Project M and Project + are a no go as well.

If you didn't quite get it from all of those baffling restrictions and potentially catastrophic rules, the Smash Bros. community is not amused. Fans are in an uproar all over social media at the moment, with some already claiming that "it's over" and something that the competitive Smash Bros. scene could potentially never recover from if Nintendo doesn't loosen restrictions. Hopefully it doesn't come to that, as Nintendo has