Smash Bros. Fighter Ballot

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The ballot as it appeared on the website

The Smash Bros. Fighter Ballot was an official poll added as part of the Super Smash Bros. 4 Official Site. The ballot was added to the website on April 1st, 2015 with the purpose being for the general public to suggest which characters they would like to see in Super Smash Bros. 4, with the Japanese website mentioning the ballot would also be used to decide characters in future games as well.

Background

On April 1, 2015, the website was updated to include a new section titled Smash Bros. Fighter Ballot. The purpose of this ballot was for regular players outside the development team to have an input on what characters should be released as DLC. Upon entering the site, the voter is given four tasks. The first is to identify their gender - male or female - then the character, their game of origin, and a brief explanation as to why the character should be included. This final section has a 500 character limit. Once every section is filled out, the voter presses the large confirm button, where the vote is submitted to a database. There is no limit to the amount of times a single person can vote, although only a single vote per person was considered valid and effected the results of the ballot. This ballot was live until October 3, 2015, where it was closed and removed from the website. Around 1.8 million valid votes were then tallied, and a winner was decided.

Result

During the Final Video Presentation on December 15, 2015, Bayonetta was declared as the winner of the ballot. She was stated as the #1 choice in Europe and in the top 5 in North America, while also being stated as the #1 choice among "realizable and negotiable" characters, which was the real deciding factor. Bayonetta was released as the final Smash 4 DLC fighter on February 3, 2016 alongside the Umbra Clock Tower stage.

Datamine

Shortly after the release of Mewtwo, five additional placeholder slots for future downloadable content, under the name "mario", were found, with a sixth one added after the release of wave 2 (Lucas, Roy, and Template:SSSB4), near the end of the ballot's run. On July 2, 2018, decompiler Ruben found that Bayonetta's stats were added to one of the original five placeholder slots, as early as before version 1.0.6, as her character slot was added to the game in that patch, which was launched only two weeks after the Smash Bros. Fighter Ballot opened and several months before Bayonetta was announced as the winner of the ballot. Decompilers Marioking64DS and Ehm from The Cutting Room Floor later confirmed that the character slot for Bayonetta existed in the patch, whose parameters were a near 1:1 copy of Zero Suit Samus, which would then gradually change in the subsequent patches to eventually match Bayonetta's parameters when she was released in 1.1.4. This information suggests that Bayonetta had already been decided as a character before the ballot ended, and that the character slot added later down the line was Corrin rather than Bayonetta.

It has been argued that it was possible the ballot's votes were frontloaded during the first two weeks it was open and so the ballot winner was chosen off of such early results, though it has also been counterargued that less than two weeks would have been too short a lead time to observe the ballot results, complete the licensing for Bayonetta, and get the development process far enough along for her to appear in the game data by 1.0.6.

Impact on Ultimate

Masahiro Sakurai would later confirm that the results were used to determine new characters in future installments of the series. Several popular characters from the Fighter Ballot were introduced as fighters in Ultimate, such as Banjo & Kazooie, Ridley, King K. Rool, Simon, Richter, Chrom, and Dark Samus. Masahiro Sakurai mentioned Banjo & Kazooie in particular placing highly in the ballot, including in Japan, stating them to be a close runner-up behind the winner.

On September 23rd, 2021, Sora was revealed as the final addition to Ultimate's roster. Sakurai revealed during the presentation that Sora was the winner of the Smash Bros. Fighter Ballot, revealing him as being the most requested new fighter in the ballot. He also added that he and Satoru Iwata had elected not to reveal the official results to prevent fans from harassing the companies who owned winning characters that were not added.