No, I'm not missing any context. The E-sports audience is largely incompatible with the audience that enjoys playing with fun and interesting toys.
Completely incompatible? No, and that's not what I said. In any sufficiently-large group there will be exceptions to that group's general tendencies.
Were I Nintendo, I would definitely take pains to put a big damper on people and organizations who wanted to do "professional" E-sports to my toys... which seems to me to be exactly what they're doing.
Wait now you're now making a different point entirely. Before you suggested they shouldn't need to go out of their way to treat e-sports any differently (to accomodate them) because they're not the target market. Now you're saying they should go out of their way to treat them differently (to punish/hinder them) because they're not the target market?
Look I get that e-sports isn't for everyone, it's certainly not for me. But this doesn't make sense, and I suspect that this push against e-sports or modding isn't coming from the creative minds behind the games themselves, but by management who couldn't care less about whether something is or is not a toy. It's the people who just want to see black on their end of year balance sheets and don't understand how e-sports or modding would impact that (including how it could even improve it)
> Wait now you're now making a different point entirely.
No. You misunderstood what I've been saying since the first paragraph of my initial post.
I've been consistently saying that the E-sports is kinda awful, and that that scene is generally at odds with the sort of folks who like playing with fun and interesting toys.
Once the E-sports locusts solidly descend on something, its nature gets changed (by association, at minimum). Nintendo clearly (and correctly) doesn't want that, so they're right to discourage it.
They're a "fun and interesting toy" company, not a "professional, competitive e-sports games" company.
Respectfully, you don't know what you're talking about.
Nintendo has a history of hosting competitive tournaments for games such as Pokemon (and even in a limited capacity Smash Bros). They even made a Pokemon game targeted at competitive players called Pokemon Unite, which they continue to organise tournaments for.
For Smash Bros in particular, they partnered with an e-sports company called Panda Global to officially sanction a circuit last year.
However, their awful track record with e-sports comes from mercilessly shutting down events they are not involved with (even when the organisers have reached out to Nintendo in good faith to discuss their involvment). They even go out of their way to dish out cease-and-desists at the last minute so that organisers don't have time to consider their legal options and rights before going ahead with the event.
There was a big scandal last year when Nintendo were having positive discussions about a partnership with a circuit called Smash World Tour then turned around and proceeded to threaten them just as the end of year finals were about to take place, forcing them to cancel an event that had been over a year in the making, and involving many professional players, hired staff and a lot of money (they could have just let them continue without being involved).
And just as a clarification, almost all these Smash events are not organised for profit by your big bad e-sports companies. Due to Nintendo's actions they have been mostly organically grown community-led efforts, all they want to do at the end of the day is have fun and play the game together.
Nintendo have shown time and again they will abuse their status as a big corporate entity to destroy harmless fan activity if they are not happy about it for any reason.
So just because you have a disdain for something in particular, you shouldn't project that onto a situation and use it as a false explanation for what's happening.
I think you absolutely have hit the nail on the head in your arguments here.
E-sports leagues want the tool to be consistent across the years, and want to make sure their top players are able to maintain their elite status for the headlines and press they get. Games that cater to e-sports leagues tend to be come very much about power players; fun is secondary to winning.
That is incompatible with a company that seems to want to make fun things for a family to play, like Nintendo.
Copyright striking everything is one issue, but not wanting to bend over backwards for e-sports is a different thing entirely; and I think it makes sense for a massive company like Nintendo.
The sister-comment to yours by user fat-chunk describes it much better, but we're not even talking about big commercial events and corporate entities. We're talking about community events run for fun, rather than profit. But even then, the point is that if they don't want to cater to these communities they can simply ignore any requests and not engage whatsoever.
You say they needn't "bend over backwards for e-sports" but that's not what's happening. Maybe players would prefer the consistency you describe, maybe they even ask for it ... but more than anything they just want the ability to play. As it stands Nintendo are being pretty petty and are bending over backwards to fuck with them, when they could instead just ... not.
> That is incompatible with a company that seems to want to make fun things for a family to play, like Nintendo.
Yes, because sibling rivalry and intense competition among family simply never happens. It's always just a fun time where everybody is a winner. Except for the fact that games like Smash Bros, Mario Kart, Mario Party, Wii Sports, etc will literally call out the winners and the losers of the tournament/match/game.
This argument makes no sense whatsoever. Plenty of people like to play Football, Baseball, Basketball, insert sport here for fun. That doesn't change the fact that there are paid professional leagues that take it to the next level. And the reason the professionals get paid is because other people, even sometimes those casual players, enjoy watching professionals play their favorite game at a superb level of skill.
> Copyright striking everything is one issue, but not wanting to bend over backwards for e-sports is a different thing entirely;
You and OP keep saying this. Please tell me what restrictions e-Sports players are trying to place on Nintendo? In this specific instance, SWT was literally playing one game that is 22 years old and that Nintendo does not even sell anymore (afaict you can't purchase Smash Melee from Nintendo). The other game was released 5 years ago, and the e-Sports scene wasn't demanding that Nintendo stop making updates or something afaik.
And, just as an aside, I don't give a crap about e-Sports. But the e-Sports scene certainly hasn't detracted from my enjoyment of playing smash with my brothers for fun and for competitive fun.
Yes this is what's so bizarre! You and I are disconnected from that scene altogether (I don't even like Smash!), we don't have any vested interests and yet we can both see that it's really weird behaviour from Nintendo. We can only guess what's going on, tbh it's such a spectacularly wealthy company they can get up to plenty of dumb things without ever really noticing the impact on their bottom line.
Completely incompatible? No, and that's not what I said. In any sufficiently-large group there will be exceptions to that group's general tendencies.
Were I Nintendo, I would definitely take pains to put a big damper on people and organizations who wanted to do "professional" E-sports to my toys... which seems to me to be exactly what they're doing.