Nintendo Pulls Game From Evo Live Stream, Igniting Backlash; Comes To Senses Mere Hours Later
from the it-can-be-taught! dept
Nintendo's adversarial relationship with its fanbase continues. Following on the heels of its colossally boneheaded Let's Play YouTube land grab, the company decided to yank its Super Smash Bros. Melee from the Evo (Evoution Championship Series) live streams.
Competitive Smash Bros. fans have been working for years to gain acceptance from the greater fighting game community. Smash Bros. is very different from Street Fighter, Tekken, and Virtua Fighter, but as many have said, it still is a fighting game, despite what some of the more exclusionary members of the FGC may tell you.Instead of being thrilled its game was going to be featured alongside other prominent fighting games, Nintendo felt the best course of action was to "protect the brand," even if that meant the company's public image would greatly resemble a bootleg window sticker featuring Calvin peeing on a pink ribbon.
These years of effort have more or less paid off. After raising nearly $100K for Breast Cancer research, Smash Bros. Melee was set to be a marquee title at Evo 2013 this weekend. As the live stream phenomena has grown in prominence and popularity over the years, so has Evo's online presence. Evo 2011 was streamed by over 2.2 million viewers (still working on digging up numbers for 2012). That's more than Bayonetta sold in the US.
Needless to say, the backlash was immediate. A petition was posted at change.org asking Nintendo to reconsider its decision. Of course, Nintendo hardly seems concerned with the public's reaction to anything at this point, so it's kind hard to imagine an internet petition changing its mind. In fact, it's hard to imagine anything changing its mind, even vague promises to support the WiiU, issued with the same momentary earnestness as the pained vows to attend church more frequently that often follow long nights of hard drinking and bad decisions.
But, as hard as it is to imagine Nintendo walking back a "protect the brand" decision, it's actually a true fact.
Update #2: Nintendo has reversed its decision! They're now allowing Melee to stream at Evo this year. Though Nintendo has its share of old codgers that don't know how to internet, maybe this proves that their younger colleagues have the capacity to shake them into reality, and in just a few hours no less.They say you can't teach old dogs new tricks. However, it appears the old dogs still have a healthy respect for the sting of the tightly-rolled
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: evo, fans, streaming, super smash bros.
Companies: nintendo
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
But, like Microsoft, only AFTER they've made a public embarrassment of themselves with an idiot move that anyone could have told them would backfire beforehand. The problem is that people are telling them how dumb these moves are well before any announcement is made - even comments based on half-assed rumours can give you a clue as to how opinion is going to go on the final decision - but their comments are ignored.
...and what do they get in return? "Protect the brand"? From what? People who are going to see the game in action - many of whom won't own the game, or even necessarily own a Nintendo product at all? Are they going to suddenly not buy because they see someone else playing the game? Are their trademarks at risk because someone sees a streaming game?
It's the sadly typical story of late. Over-protection of IP actually makes the product less valuable, and people who point out the problems are ignored until a public, potentially costly, about turn is required. the lawyers get paid either way, of course, but the corporate mindset really does need to change before they risk killing their own products entirely.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
Yes, it was a bone-headed decision by Nintendo in the first place, but they were much more responsive to their customers.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
MS's most recent problem was on a brand new product in the final processes of development, if not already being manufactured. The problem was with something presented as a fundamental feature of the console, for which there may already have been infrastructure and licencing in place. Backtracking involved making huge decisions about the marketing, production and design of the console, and required re-evaluation of their whole product line. True, it's stuff they should already have known about and considered long ago, but there was huge financial and other implications of what they had to do.
On the other hand, Nintendo are talking about a Gamecube game that's already sold millions worldwide, and a controversy that boils down to a legal letter sent to a 3rd party. All they needed to do was say "oops, sorry, you can play the stream after all". Of course they were more responsive!
That's not to defend either company (MS in particular should have considered the months' of comments based on rumours as a big clue to how the similar reality would be received). But, Nintendo don't come out better just because they happened to make a mistake that was quicker to rectify.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re:
Not to mention the game in question is over twelve years old, exists on a system that can't be bought new anymore and is several years out of print.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Re:
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Window Sticker
I have to create a sticker with Mario peeing on a pink ribbon, submit your orders now!
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Really I'm amazed Nintendo learned about EVO at all, it seems unless news is faxed to them or is delivered via carrier pigeon, they seem completely deaf to it happening
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
The downside is that gold plated WiiU's would cost a few thousand dollars. The upside is that you'd get hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertizing in return.
I fondly remember the days when id was giving away Ferraris' at these type of events.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Hey you or some other guy should make an article about that R4 report, they sadly won a court case about R4, and that the R4 companies has to pay about 944k. I personality think it's an issue.
Glad they did something good today though for this though.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]