This weekend, many of the top players in the fighting game community will gather in Las Vegas for Evo 2014 — the world’s premiere fighting game tournament. This year, however, Evo finds itself with an unlikely supporter.
Evo has a longstanding history of corporate sponsorship for the event. Companies with ties to the games and culture, such as Twitch, Arc System Works, SNK and Namco Bandai have been frequent sponsors over the years. One company that has not only been absent, but have acted specifically against it’s games being included was Nintendo.
Yesterday popular Smash Bros. commentator D’ron Maingrette tweeted the list of sponsors for this year’s tournament, which revealed that Nintendo will be one of the 20 companies providing financial support for this weekend’s tournament. This comes as a surprise to many in the community, as the company made a huge fuss in attempting to block the use of Super Smash Bros. Melee in last year’s tournament, in addition to all of their issues with streaming of their games on Twitch and YouTube.
In sponsoring the tournament, the company appears to be continuing their change of heart and embracing the fighting game culture, as we saw with their E3 Smash Bros. tournament and announcement of a GameCube controller adapter for Wii U.
This also comes after Nintendo started to make a shift in its policies, allowing streaming and publishing of videos, although with the stipulation that content creators participate in revenue sharing, as a means to embrace the Twitch and “Let’s Play” community
It’s also likely that Nintendo is trying to drum up excitement for Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and 3DS later this year, especially when you look at the middling Wii U sales numbers.
That shouldn’t come as a surprise, though, seeing how after nearly two years after the Wii U release, the console is still struggling to gain a stable foothold in the market, being consistently outsold by the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, which have been available for less than a year. As such, it wouldn’t be unlikely for Nintendo to be hedging their bets on Smash Bros. as a system seller. Getting the game in front of as many eyes as possible is important, so sponsoring and participating in something like Evo is one way to do just that.
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