Nintendo of America Partners Up With CEO 2016 for Smash Bros. Melee and Wii U Tournaments

Nice to see Nintendo embracing the competitive gaming community more.

I will be watching the Smash 4 stream. I prefer 1 vs 1 but I am warming up to the team based format

Does CEO have a CEO?

Even though he's not in that great of a tier... Go KIRBY!!!

@Spin You mean closing down events unless they're able to throw in their game ads here and there during the stream. A.K.A. their definition of partnering.

I'll definitely be watching Melee and U on this, both should be really exciting once again.

I'm probably participating. Good thing I live in West Palm Beach!

I just have to hope my family doesn't once again go on vacation before CEO...

Hmmm 2 hours south of me. Might have to check this out.

Awesome! I'm glad Nintendo is finally taking note of the competitive scene! Go ESAM!

@LegendOfPokemon In Sm4sh, Kirby is actually pretty good compared to Melee and Brawl. I'd say mid tier. So many of his aerials auto-cancel, allowing him to do some crazy things.

Already had this on my calendar because they are playing Pokkén too. Excited! ^.^

This is nice. It would be cool to see them come out and, for example, give props to whoever wins these big tourneys on Twitter. Smash 4 and Melee have a gigantic competitive scene, but they've had to do everything by themselves with no help (and often hindrance) from Nintendo. Nintendo wants the game to be a party game, like Brawl, the fans want it to be a fighting game, like Melee, and Smash 4 is the greatest convergence of "why not both?"

The frequent buffs of competitively-determined low tiers (except Puff, for some reason), and the nerfs of competitively-determined top tiers could not have just been the result of Sakurai randomly picking characters to make better or worse. The buffs and nerfs (mostly of 1.15) really show that Sakurai and the team had been watching competitive Smash and determining which characters needed to be nerfed/buffed and in what areas. All this: the competitive Invitational before the game's release, the constant patches, the support of tournaments (however infrequent), the addition of a tournament mode in online play, and even Reggie saying "No Johns" in a direct all point to one thing: Nintendo is starting to embrace the possibility that Smash is a competitive fighting game and should be treated as such. The casual fans don't care about competition, and thus won't care if Nintendo supports the competitive fanbase. If they do, maybe we can eventually see Smash at a major eSports event.

#FreeLeffen

@LinkSword Since when do they do that? Any proof?

The evidence points to the opposite.

https://www.reddit.com/r/smashbros/comments/41qiwf/had_a_conversation_with_a_nintendo_employee_at/

They've been supporting the competitive scene for a while now.

Aaaaa dangit!! We're probably going to Florida in July/August this year so i'm going to miss this by about a month. Blah!!

@TheRedCap30 I wouldn't say Jiggs was a joke character in 64, she was in fact one of the most popular characters in pokemon at the time due to the anime. Mewtwo got the short end of the stick for Brawl, Jiggs got in, how's that the short end? As for Smash 4, I also feel she's in simply due to being part of the original 12. Jiggs' popularity in Pokemon (games and anime) is very low now, sure she got a tiny little bump due to the introduction of the fairy type 3 years ago, but she's mostly relevant because of Smash. I thought for sure she would have been cut for Smash 4. Now I think she'll be back for a future Smash 5 just because she's part of the original 12...

@A01 me too. Subspace Emissary was the huge selling point of the game for me, and I felt sad it didn't get a comparative mode in Smash 4. Smash Run just isn't big enough to do it for me.