Popular streamer starts his own Smash tournament

Popular streamer Ludwig has announced his own Super Smash Bros. tournament after a major Smash tournament was reportedly shut down

Popular YouTube streamer Ludwig has announced he’ll be footing the bill for a new Super Smash Bros. tournament to replace the Smash World Tour championship finals that were reportedly shut down by Nintendo.

Ludwig, who has 3.76m subscribers on YouTube and was once the most-subscribed streamer on Twitch, has announced a new tournament called the Scuffed World Tour, an obvious play on the now-cancelled Smash World Tour. The streamer said it was “in light of Panda/Nintendo’s lackluster response”.

The streamer has said that his new event would be a one-day event featuring Super Smash Bros. Melee and Ultimate, the same games featured in the Smash World Tour, and would feature the top eight players for each game, per Smash World Tour’s rankings. He even offered to fly out the players for the event, and offered a prize pool of $50,000.

In light of Panda/Nintendos lackluster response I’m happy to announce

🎉The Scuffed World Tour🎉

A one day melee/ultimate event

Sunday 12/18

Featuring the 8 highest placing SWT competitors

All with the goal to raise money for VGBC

See you there :)

— ludwig (@LudwigAhgren) December 2, 2022

It comes after Nintendo reportedly shut down the Smash World Tour tournament, a community-created event that has been running for almost two years. According to the event’s organisers, Nintendo of America liaised with the group for over a year, before finally telling the group that they could not operate without a commercial license.

Smash World Tour (SWT) claimed that Panda CEO Alan Bunney, whose company has a commercial license to hold Super Smash Bros. events, told event organisers that SWT would not be returning in 2022. This is despite conversations the group had with Nintendo, which assured them the events could go ahead unlicensed. Later, Nintendo reportedly pulled the plug.

Nintendo disputed this account of events, however, in recent statements to the press. The company claimed in a statement made to Eurogamer that it did refuse a commercial license for the upcoming tournaments, but that it “let [SWT] know verbally” that the SWT finals would not need to be cancelled, citing the impact it would have on players.

“Thus,” Nintendo said, “the decision to cancel the SWT 2022 was, and still is, their own choice”.

Super Smash Bros Ultimate released in 2018 and has seen multiple waves of DLC characters released since.

SWT further hit back with its own statement, saying that they are “struggling to understand why Nintendo contacted [SWT] at all” if the company intended to let the tournament go ahead. While the group is much less clear-cut in disputing what Nintendo said, they do say that they felt it was clear that it was Nintendo’s intention to block the event.

Thankfully, some fighting game tournaments are much less controversial and stressful. A recent Street Fighter tournament saw a 16-year-old pull off a surprise win, a move so shocking that even the winner himself wasn’t sure what to do with himself and walked off stage.

Written by Oliver Brandt on behalf of GLHF.