Pro gaming and speedruns are still free marketing - there will be people who know the games and come for the challenge content, but there will be others as well who are going to enjoy the show and buy their own copy.
I'm not saying he's bringing in their core demographics. Just that he makes some sales for them.
> Pro gaming and speedruns are still free marketing
Nintendo hates those. Look at how they treated the Smash community. It shocked me and I don't even like those games. Nintendo sucks and doesn't deserve anyone's money. Don't even try to understand them or their motives, sucking is just a part of their DNA.
I never understood that thing around the Smash games. Looking at them from outside, they look like a "cute" beat'em'up fighting game for spending some fun time, not like something for "serious" championships, tournaments and the like.
For Super Smash Bros Melee in particular, I think it's just a ridiculously in-depth game, more than it has any right to be. Nintendo essentially invented an entire new sub-genre of the platform fighting game and perfected it in basically two iterations. It's pretty easy to pick up and play, but it has surprising depth. It's challenging to illustrate briefly, but for example, just take a look at what the map of control stick actions looks like from resting state:
The truth is, even though I don't play video games much at all any more, I played this game when I was younger and kept a pulse on it since, so I know when a character matchup is bad, and I can recognize difficult techniques like ledge dashing or amsah teching. But, I argue as well that even though it's silly and even though you may not be able to pick out all of the ridiculous high-level play going on in a match, the energy of competitive gaming is simply infectious. It's hard to pick just one video, but maybe something here will resonate with folks unfamiliar. Is it a little silly? Yes, definitely. But the energy is infectious. It draws me in.
The newest game in the series, Super Smash Bros Ultimate, has a commendable competitive scene, even though Nintendo has kind of nerfed a lot of the things that made Melee so competitively interesting later on in the series (ledge hogging, wave dashing, ...) and focused more on making a party game.
People keep playing Melee though, with tournaments going on pretty much all the time (and getting shut down all the time, too), even though they usually have to run at a financial loss, for the love of the sport, as lacking official blessing, it is hard to attract advertisers and sponsors. But seriously, just take a look at what they've done with Slippi.gg: They've essentially taken this old game and added rollback netcode and matchmaking to it. It's not exactly unheard of amount of dedication, but I find it very impressive nonetheless.
When I look at what happened to this scene, I can't help but feel there is a lot of missed opportunity any way you slice it. But maybe, I'm just out of touch and nostalgic.
Tetris: The Grand Master, a '90s arcade game that's been out of print for twenty years, was just rereleased for Switch more or less entirely because of its speedrunning community.
It's sad what happened to that game. I feel that Arika's take on Tetris would've resonated with a lot of people had it not been forced into obscurity by the bizarre regime of guideline Tetris.
But, the behavior of The Tetris Company is it's own bag of worms, and an even more agitating one than Nintendo. If anyone was looking for an example of how to be worse, I think TTC may very well have the formula down.
Sure but when your audience tunes in tuesday and you are playing the latest zelda game or whatever because it's the next game you are going to try and speedrun maybe you just sold some copies of that game.
Pointcrow isn't, currently, one of those guys that plays just one game forever or even one game mostly. He's a 'variety streamer', he does have a pretty firm focus on nintendo games both classic and new but that isn't his whole ouvre.
I think it could be moving some, but IMO more correct thing to say is that "they should be thankful for free advertisement" argument never goes well. It makes no visible changes but seems to silently lock closed doors.
I got 2 games after watching a speedrun, so... you're off by at least those. But seriously, events like agdq have enough variety that people do get to see new things there.
Maybe not console units, but I am sure it has sold games themselves. Games (and accessories) are where the money is, console units are commonly sold at or below cost
I'm not saying he's bringing in their core demographics. Just that he makes some sales for them.