Quality esports documentaries are few and far between, so if you’re interested in learning more about communities and what makes them tick, I suggest you go check out Metagame, which is airing live on Twitch at the moment.
Metagame is a follow-up to The Smash Brothers, a documentary about the history of Super Smash Bros. Melee as a competitive scene until 2013. This helped Melee surge with new players and interest, and “doc kids” like me were welcomed into the community.
I helped Kickstart the follow-up to The Smash Brothers, and that’s what Metagame looks to have evolved from. I’m not sure if a brief interview I filmed with the director, Samox, made it into this cut, but hey, short-haired Matt might be in there somewhere.
I bring this up, mostly because I wanted to talk about community goodwill, which is something that’s a bit of a hot-button issue concerning Nintendo. The company is known for being particularly loud when it comes to cease-and-desisting fan projects, and this extends to things beyond smaller creators looking to do shady things.
This year, a major Smash tournament “The Big House” was shut down by Nintendo by not providing a license to stream the tournament. By doing that, the tournament was effectively dead: no stream means no viewers, and no viewers mean no sponsors.
This is due to a fan modification called Slippi, which allows Super Smash Bros. Melee, a Nintendo GameCube game from 2002, to run well modern PCs. More importantly, it allows for a fan-implemented solution for playing the game online with other people.
It also does it much better than previous implementations, with notable improvements to input lag and responsiveness. During the COVID-19 shutdowns, this was/is essential to keeping Melee’s competitive scene alive, as previously all events would be done in-person.
While Slippi is always advertised to play on your own personal dumped GameCube discs, many people who do play it will be using an ISO disk image found on popular torrent sites, or elsewhere. This is what Nintendo took issue with, and the grey area of “emulators are legal, sharing ROMs/ISOs are not, and dumping your own copy is fine” became a big point of contention.
Since Nintendo couldn’t ascertain whether every player was playing on their copy, their shutdown seemed to be in bad faith; the company does not have an updated version of Melee to play on current-generation consoles, and the game is out of print. Since the GameCube also used smaller CDs, rather than full-sized ones, it becomes harder to suspend belief that everyone figured out how to rip the game from their discs.
The Big House’s shutdown also extended to Super Smash Bros Ultimate, Nintendo’s most current offering in the series, as well. Ultimate is infamous for its poor online services and playability, and that’s something that Nintendo struggles with across the board.
To many players, this shutdown was a boiling-over point for their relationship with Nintendo and esports: the prevailing thought is “you won’t make online work well, you refuse to listen to us, you used our tournaments to promote your new game when it was convenient, and now you’re shutting our stuff down during a pandemic?”
This event kind of kicked off a couple weeks of action from Nintendo, with them removing dozens of YouTube videos of soundtracks to their games, and also shutting down the Top 8 of a Splatoon tournament (another game they also developed) because teams in that Top 8 has names supportive of the Big House/Melee situation.
I want to briefly consider Nintendo’s “side” in the Big House/Slippi argument:
Slippi promotes a system of online play that Nintendo cannot quality-control or be responsible for. If a child watches this tournament and downloads Slippi, it’s at their own risk, but Nintendo still bears possible liability legally.
Slippi represents a degradation of control in Nintendo’s sphere. It helps the narrative of incompetence when it comes to their online products. Nintendo isn’t in control of how that project develops/represents them.
Slippi represents possible lost sales in the event of re-releasing Melee. Since there hasn’t been any announced project or intent to re-release it, this is just smoke.
Slippi encourages a participation in a grey-market culture of emulators, ROMs and illegal file-sharing. Onboarding people through Slippi may encourage them to explore where they wouldn’t before.
The thing is, I have to mentally ask the question: is it all worth all the damage you’re doing to your relationship with your fans right now? Is it worth it doing this so blatantly?
Nintendo and Disney have similar weights to these relationships because there’s a certain sentimentality to their products that don’t exist as loudly with their competitors. If brands are religion, Disney and Nintendo are orthodox: they have enough influence around multiple generations of people, and a reputation for their authenticity.
Shutting down a tournament or shutting down a fan project damages that relationship, and also casts off the veil of “Nintendo are family.” Suddenly, we’re reminded that they’re a corporation like any other, and have interests that extend beyond making people happy. We’d like to believe otherwise, but that reminder can be harsh: no matter how positive the childhood memories, Disney and Nintendo are not your friends.
I bring up these two companies because they share the quality of being “too big to talk.” While other game developers (especially indies) will have a more frank dialog with the people playing and working with their games, Nintendo basically knows that no level of grassroots effort for their titles can survive without them.
They know they are in the power position, just as Disney would be in the world of Star Wars fan films, unlicensed lightsaber toy shops, or bootleg Halloween costumes. They have calculated that this shutdown won’t affect them in the long run, as there’s an entire cottage industry of content creators happy to play ball with them to promote their next project.
For many, it was frustrating to see a company roadblock them, especially when they didn’t provide a better service. There’s no way to play Melee competitively online. There’s no way to play Melee competitively in-person without CRT TVs due to input lag. There’s no way to listen to those soundtracks (for big games, like The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time) legally, when many other companies are content to do it on Spotify.
To many people, Nintendo is this thing that they want to like more, but they seem extremely slow to pick up that modern customers need modern access to the things they love. This all comes off very pessimistic (possibly because I’ve been playing too much Cyberpunk 2077), but I think it’s important to realize the value proposition for each party involved.
Especially with grassroots (ie, not developer-run) esports, the feeling of authenticity and passion are ones that can’t be vat-grown. They have to come from someplace real, and the more that companies try to take advantage of it, the more difficult it becomes to stay ahead of that cynicism curve.
While Nintendo can say “we’re too big to care about what a couple hundred people do or feel”, those niche communities become places where companies look to in order to innovate or adapt. Burning too much of their goodwill can leave them out in the cold when the need eventually comes.
The disappointing thing is, though, that Nintendo has an endless bank of brand recognition that impedes these niche communities and keeps them from moving on. Other indie games that play like Smash, but aren’t Smash, rise, fall and fizzle, despite being incredibly willing to work with the esports side of things. Without Mario, Link, Samus and Donkey Kong, however, these games aren’t the same in the same way as DreamWorks isn’t Disney.
Something feels off, different, and uncomfortable. People go back to Nintendo where it’s safe, warm, and familiar.
I don’t know where I’m going with all this, but I guess I wanted to shed some light on an issue of brand loyalty and authenticity that I think a lot about. Especially with the Game Awards happening last night, I considered how much it felt like it mattered that “the right game” won each award, but how little it actually meant for my life.
All you really get is the validation that your attention is being put in the “right” place, but that specific validation is fleeting and ultimately meaningless to your overall growth as a person. The benefit of these awards shows are never for you: they’re just there to slap on an ad campaign so the winners can sell more copies.
I digress. Do what feels right for you. Find people that passion and love of a thing feel real with. Don’t feel like you need a company or other fans’ validation to enjoy a thing. If you’re in the position of managing a community, figure out how much ownership you want to give to the fans: it doesn’t have to be 50-50, but knowing how much control you want to keep (or give up) means you can at least set expectations for yourself and the people who love you most.
Until next week.
Housekeeping and Updates
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