Nintendo Community Tournament Guidelines

The Nintendo Community Tournament Guidelines are a series of regulations raised by Nintendo Co., Ltd., placing restrictions on the operation of unlicensed, not-for-profit, small-scale tournaments, run by individuals, involving Nintendo games and media, including competitive Super Smash Bros. tournaments. The guidelines were first published on the Nintendo of Japan website in Japanese on October 24th, 2023, and were released on the company's European and American websites the same day; they will go into effect on November 15th, 2023. The announcements were quickly spread on social media shortly following their publications, and received widespread backlash throughout the competitive Smash community.

Summary

New regulations applying to unlicensed tournaments include the following:

• Tournaments must be capped at 200 entrants for in-person events, and 300 entrants for online events.
• Entry fees must be capped at $20/£18/€20/¥2000 per person.
• Prize pools are capped at $5000/£4,500/€5,000/¥500,000 for a single event, or $10,000/£9,000/€10,000/¥1,000,000 for a single tournament organizer across an entire year.
• Spectator fees must be capped at $15/£14/€15/¥1,500 per person.
• Tournament organizers may not receive goods, services, money, etc., from third parties as sponsors.
• The names of Community Tournaments may not contain Nintendo trademarks or IP.
• Pirated or modified versions of Nintendo games may not be used.
• Only online servers officially provided by Nintendo may be used.
• Tournament organizers must publicly acknowledge that the event is not sponsored by or affiliated with Nintendo.
• Tournament organizers must publicly post a URL linking to "Terms for participating in and viewing Community Tournaments using Nintendo Games."
• Tournament organizers must obtain separate rights for the usage of any intellectual property rights from third parties.
• Tournaments may not involve the sale of food, beverages, and other merchandise.
• The usage of game consoles and accessories not produced by Nintendo is prohibited.
• Any content or practice deemed "inappropriate" by Nintendo not already mentioned is punishable in type and severity at their discretion.

It is possible to apply for a license either for a nonprofit community tournament or for a for-profit tournament. Licenses for nonprofit tournaments allow for easying up some restrictions, namely on the number of participants and on entrance fees. The specifics for for-profit licenses are currently still unknown.

Background

This article or section is incomplete. You can help SmashWiki by expanding or finishing it. The editor who added this tag elaborates: More details on Smash's competitive history with Nintendo; history of Nintendo-sponsored events, etc. Lots to go over here that could help contextualise how we got here at all.

Since 2019, various eSports titles, such as those made by Capcom and Electronic Arts, have been receiving community guidelines for their tournament scenes. This is in response to a rise in eSports industry trends, with China notably seeing eSports grow beyond traditional sports in popularity and seeing government support.

For the past 20 years, the community had not had any restrictions on its tournaments, resulting in issues like the 2020 Super Smash Bros. sexual misconduct allegations, issues with alcohol and drugs, and more. The competitive Smash community has, in part due to these issues, had frosty relations with Nintendo since its inception, with some recent examples of conflict prior to the guidelines's inception being the cancellation of Smash World Tour 2022 and cancellation of The Big House Online.

Reactions

The announcement of the guidelines was met with skepticism throughout the Smash community, amidst fear that the regulations would lead to the curtailing of local and regional tournament scenes. The guidelines were viewed as another reflection of Nintendo's anti-competitive stance, in a similar manner to its attempted cancellation of Smash World Tour 2022 a year prior. Many community members, especially within the Melee scene, feared that the guidelines' implications meant that online tournaments using Slippi (such as Coinbox), as well as the usage of box controllers and Universal Controller Fix, would be banned. It was soon discovered that the Japanese website only allowed organizers to apply for licenses to host Nintendo Switch games, leading to fears that hosting licensed Melee events could become completely impossible.

Other concerns include tournaments having a hard limit on the amount of revenue they can earn and sponsors effectively being forbidden will lead to some no longer being able to financially break even, a prohibition on food and drink vendors potentially being illegal under certain circumstances, and the ban on inappropriate content being a catch-all that means Nintendo can go after anyone for any reason regardless of how well the other rules are being followed.

Many community members (including Hungrybox) did a live read-through of the guidelines on stream. Montana State Representative Zooey Zephyr (and competitive Smash player under the tag Cazcom) posted a tweet criticizing the new regulations, saying, "Imagine Bicycle Playing Cards insisting your home poker games be played a certain way or they'll sue you." The same reaction occurred to other people outside of the Super Smash Bros. competitive community, if not the entire community, as the guidelines applied to any Nintendo games with competition, such as Splatoon 2 and Splatoon 3, Pokken Tournament DX, or Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. YouTube commentator Omni said this case "looks like the end" for any non-profit tournaments.

On the other hand, several players reacted more positively to the guidelines, with some mentioning security breach issues and major controversies that happened in some tournaments or within the community, such as VGBC or the 2020 Super Smash Bros. sexual misconduct allegations. YouTuber Technicals notably reacted with pride, claiming it was "his perfect victory", which caused strong reactions from the community. In addition, many tournament organizers within the Japanese Smash community reacted with less skepticism. Within hours of the announcement, many prominent Japanese TOs came up with several solutions on how to deal with the guidelines.

Moon Channel, a lawyer YouTube channel, released a video giving some legal analysis regarding the guidelines. He speculates that rather than necessarily "cracking down" on events, believing that they are more of an olive branch. With US copyright laws extending largely worldwide through trade agreements, its grey areas become problematic, resulting in less certainty and thus more regulation by the company is required; to illustrate this point, he cites Nintendo's hands-off approach with its fanbase in Japan. With Nintendo's uniformity in guidelines, it becomes reasonable to speculate that this isn't a crackdown a la fan games, but more of an IP protection measure. Moon Channel goes on to mention that while third party controllers are listed as banned in the guidelines, this is actually a commonality in most guidelines, and Nintendo's own End User Licence Agreements, and is not actually enforced, being used as, again, an IP protection measure; these aren't laws, but policy. Furthermore, he argues that these guidelines are for community tournaments rather than supermajor events, as stated in the guideline's introduction, and that by following these rules, it could aid in reconciliation between Nintendo and the Smash community at large. Thus, Moon Channel infers that they could result in a more stable community, criticising big content creators for wanting to run unlicensed tournaments in protest, noting that while the full licence agreement hasn't been published, said licences being provided are discretionary.

Aftermath

Shortly after the announcement, the GENESIS team tweeted that GENESIS X would continue as scheduled. Sumabato head TO Nojinko also announced that he had secured licenses for the next ten Sumabato events within a day of the guidelines releasing, leading some to have cautious optimism towards the change.