Reminder that now more than ever, it’s important to come together and show what is it about this stupid, broken, beautiful game that we love. Thank you for being here with us as always, we’re lucky to be a part of an organization that celebrates the culture and people who made the scene what it is today. Long live Melee :)
I relish the dynamic of Toph's up-to-date-seen-every-relevant-tweet and PPMD's in-the-scene-but-not-on-the-bleeding-edge-of-news. It is incredibly helpful for the folks like myself who value curated news rather than finding all the firsthand accounts (different strokes for different folks). There are layers of involvement in the scene, and we outer layers greatly appreciate the inner layers summarizing and sharing the happenings. Keep up the fantastic work GG. 🤘
I feel like we need another smash documentary. I just wish that the public could see the beautiful community that melee is. The storylines that this year had created alone have been amazing.
Scar is literally the Melee BatMan. He might be less integrated with the scene, may not know all the names, even as outrageously as it was, wasn't even invited for the MIOM call about this. But when he sees the Bat signal in the sky. He is there in the trenches. Melee would not be here without people like Scar and Gimr and Fizzi and HMW and others literally putting the game and it's community on their backs and carrying it forwards. The game is great. It deserves to be harralled for it's magnificence in the brightest of lights. Name me another game that you can say this about. People care for real about this game.
I was wondering if you guys would do an emergency episode. Thanks for doing this during your break. I've had a really shitty day and this will be great to get through the rest of work.
What Toph is saying in the 2 caller part about not all people being compatitors is very tru. I'm from europa and can't watch top 8 of majors becuz it's 3 fckn am for me around then so I watch top 8 at college with some off my class mates and non of them play smash bros competetively and almost never even play smash bros but they still watch and enjoy it and have favorite players like S2J or Mango or Hbox. And that in my opinion is just beatiful
yeah i should've had language to better distinguish 'giga normie' from 'non-competitive spectator'. 'giga normie' to me are people who love new nintendo stuff and are barely aware of the competitive scene even after two decades. casual fans of competitive are not 'normies' imo, even if they don't play the game much
Wow, even after reading all the comments I wasn't prepared for how good the end of Jackzilla's segment would be. Such a great perspective EDIT: LOL the shame in Scar's voice when he had to admit that he was in charge of not giving both squad streamers views 😄
At the gym and was looking for something to listen to, wanna get into a positive mood but can't get this situation out of my head, so this is perfectly timed
Hearing Scar talk about melee like this makes me think of that scene in the documentary TV LAPTOP, TV LAPTOP. He and the rest of the community saved melee that time and have saved it countless times since then. We will not be deterred!
I remember being in IBDW's stream and he was listening to one of the callers and having a mental breakdown over how bad the advice the caller was giving (in regards to, you're going to get sued by Nintendo, it's going to hurt).
IBDW also hasn’t condemned Panda’s actions yet. I respect his levelheadedness but that attitude isn’t going to be all that productive in getting what we want going forward. I think at a time like this it’s better not to proceed in a quiet, respectful manner. Better to hold protests and put Panda Global to the torch. IMO, maybe I’m being far too hot-headed.
Alan helped ibdw out big time in the past, so he wants to be absolutely sure Panda pulled a psycho move on their own and not coerced by Nintendo before he goes burning that bridge.
@@alex-sm2iw it's a slippery slope. because if we burn panda to the ground sponsors won't touch smash with a 100 foot pole. it would be like shooting yourself a second time.
Woah, I got A LOT more out of this than Tweek Talks after they had a week of all the information that unfolded and they pretty much didn't even discuss it. You guys expressed why this is a big deal and I appreciate that! I can't wait until your next pod!
I don't play melee anymore but I still follow the community and the events and I never want this game to die... Melee has always been special and still feels like this familiar place it has ever been!
One positive thing i've noticed about this situation compared to previous Nintendo stuff is there a lot less Nintendo simps. I remember Big House online was full of online losers full on defending Nintendo and justifying their previous interceptions as well., It seems like the impact is hitting harder this time around + there's a lot more moral support as larger smash community compared to pockets of Ult, P+, and Melee. THE PEOPLE ARE PISSED
People used to hope there could have been a less stressful relationship with Nintendo, but over decades of stone walling opinion seems to have switched to be more, try not to push any known buttons and piss off Nintendo anymore than necessary, and unfortunately Nintendo’s stance on game mods is rather well known.
Yeah, people have listened to sports on the radio for as long as radios existed. Maybe radio melee becomes a live commentary angle for audio-only tournament coverage.
In regards to sabatoging the Panda Cup Finals if you're forced to go (ie Hbox stalling), my concern is that it would actually cause some people to tune in and would draw attention to the event itself. Backlash to Panda itself and no one discussing or viewing the Panda Cup Finals is the thing I think we should be aiming for
I think that’s only bringing publicity to the issues with Panda. If someone who’s unaware of the recent discourse tunes in and asks why someone’s being wobbled to 800% and someone explains Panda’s wrongdoings, then I think that far outweighs any benefit of their viewership to Panda.
Scar is literally the Melee BatMan. He might be less integrated with the scene, may not know all the names, even as outrageously as it was, wasn't even invited for the MIOM call about this. But when he sees the Bat signal in the sky. He is there in the trenches. Melee would not be here without people like Scar and Gimr and Fizzi and HMW and others literally putting the game and it's community on their backs and carrying it forwards. The game is great. It deserves to be harralled for it's magnificence in the brightest of lights. Name me another game that you can say this about. People care for real about this game.
We have nintendo's baby, thats why we will never escape this relationship. We raised it and grew up well and famous and now nintendo wants to be a part of it after seperating. Only time will tell if nintendo will ever soften up.
49:34 if by some act of Sakurai any Nintendo folks are reading this: if you throw Panda under the bus and publicly announce that you will cause no problems with SWT going forward, the melee community would accept that and we could wash our hands of this situation and go back to the way things were. You keep making great video games for the newer generations and we'll keep playing this 20+ year old game
So damn sad no matter what the reason... but extra bad if it's Panda messing up. Wish there was a general Smash podcast like this, maybe there is one I haven't seen. I don't think trying to be aggressive against Nintendo is gonna work... I'm confused, even if Nintendo shuts down a tournament, they can't stop you from doing the tournament itself. But to stream and record it they could stop. Or is it connected to the prize too?
Honestly I think the smash community vastly overrated how big the backlash is. The scale of it is much smaller than evo 2013 bc that had more support from the public and things like the fgc. For this bad pr approach to work the smash community has to get more public to escape the general stigma of “fake game with fake rules” making a bigger fuss of it would definitely be more effective than trying to “go our own way” which is just not realistic
The fact that Charlie, Asmongold, Ludwig and Philip Defranco have all covered this and the unanimous opinion across their collective audiences has been, "Wow that's so fucked up" shows that this particular fiasco has transcended any stigmas previously held against the smash community. Even r/nintendo is baffled by this, since there's no modding going on or misuse of Nintendo's IP. Not to mention just how horrible the timing is for Nintendo to do this, it makes them look cartoonishly evil for essentially no benefit. This is already the biggest news story in smash as far as publicity goes.
Former Nintendo employee at yt account "Kamp Koji" has a very unique and interesting take on this whole thing. Really curious to hear your thoughts on that. Don't want to misrepresent him, please watch his video, but in short I believe his thoughts were simply about proper communications, and that the corporate structure at Nintendo makes any partnership kinda shaky to begin with, if some higher-up has something against it. Like, regardless of multiple decision makers saying all is fine, if one of their superior disagrees, that supercedes any insurance they formerly gave. You could extrapolate and say that deal shouldn't have happened in the first place.
I just don't understand the "competition" section. The tournaments litterally start a week apart from each other. Once SWT is done people are gonna watch Panda Cup next. Like wtf is the CEO of Panda even doing trying to get a monopoly in Smash of all places?
Keep flexing with the Melee community! We just keep come back the same. We just get stronger! Don't mess with a GOAT! GOAT's are here to change the game! Melee changed the game. Ever since then, they knew that they didn't want a GOAT game out Melee community is the GOAT! Melee is the GOAT!
One thing that I kind of wonder is if there's any chance that Nintendo really does have lofty goals for competitive Smash, but they want to do so strictly through Panda. This was just a fleeting thought, but I thought about the Overwatch tournaments that took place before Overwatch League became a thing. Those days were really cool, but then Blizzard just shut everything down that have a prize pool of $10,000 or higher. But their motivation was to take the competition internal and control all of it, and now I think people don't even think about OW esports pre-OWL. Granted, this is absolutely not the same thing, Melee has a 20 year history of operating outside the support of Nintendo, and even if they did have some semblance of a positive goal, to do so by shutting down SWT thaaat soon before the finale was to take place is essentially unforgivable. I first got into competitive Smash in 2013 by watching VGBC's PM weeklies, then I watched PM and Melee at Apex 2014 and got much more invested in Melee, and I know sooo many people must owe their involvement in Smash to seeing it on VGBC, regardless if the impetus was Evo 2013, Samox's Doc, or PM being a thing. To do those guys that dirty, after putting Smash on their backs for so long, is just awful, no matter what it is they might mean to do.
As a casual melee enjoyer of 7+ years, I don't want to say fuck Panda or fuck the big N. However, I do want to say thank you Golden Guardians for all that you do for the scene. The crew that you've assembled rivals the fantastic four to say the least. None, PP, Toph, and Zain are all legends and I love the content that this team creates. Thank you for investing in melee and thank you for giving a shit about our scene.
hey guys, i have a weird idea that might come in handy if blur's "protest" thing takes place. could we not use the slippi spectate feature as a means of broadcasting the gameplay? no gameplay footage would be broadcasted via twitch; it would just be commentary and a code to put into your slippi launcher which relayed their inputs, and people can emulate the game for themselves to watch it unfold in real time. you get to spectate without a single image of gameplay being transmitted via twitch.
This is my second comment because this is such a great video, the second guy talking covers some really sick points too. Copyright law need updates with the rate of information these days, it’s massively outdated
Love the emergency episode, long live Melee. Just wanted to weight in as I see a lot of ideas and got some of my own in some other directions. (I would also love Zain, n0ne, and other people to weight in too in another episode.) Nintendo is a hugeeeeeee multiBILLION dollar company. Unfairly but with those resources likely legally, they play the fine line of 'go apply to be officially Nintendo licensed' and 'oh you're trying to apply but we have no obligation to be timely, so if you announce it yourself we can say to the public you fell through on your end not our fault because we have official ways of doing things'. In my opinion we don't win this via legal battles. A big issue also is our platforms. Nintendo doesn't just cease and desist the tournament. They send those to twitch and RU-vid too. Twitch and RU-vid don't want a legal battle with anyone and play it safe just autoremove (RU-vidrs have had issues forever with monetizing content in general, good examples are music or literally Nintendo RU-vidrs nonsmash). I'm sure twitch / RU-vid Terms of Service are set so we the people can't force them. And Nintendo targeting them is easy enough. It makes sense why Twitch / RU-vid does this, they just say it's not their fight why risk getting involved. Overall getting off these platforms pushes the scene to obscurity and that's what we risk. If it isn't mainstream it isn't sponsored, it doesn't get financial support, people can't make it their full time living to be a pro player, community growth stagnates without mainstream content, future members of the community no longer exist, the community starts shrinking instead of growing, the game isn't pushed to it's limits, etc and overall this is the direction things can go in a legal battle. My thoughts are we have to be vocal about this. Going from smaller to larger, we need all melee people, to all smashers, to all Nintendo players, to all gamers in general, to all streamers and RU-vidrs to get involved from as many spaces as we can. Ludwig, Alpharad, Mr Beast, Pewdiepie, etc are all realistically within possibility. Next to having awareness the bottom line is cutting into profits. You just gotta stop financially supporting Nintendo by buying idk Pokemon. There needs to be clear financial protest and that is the most current obvious IP. All new Nintendo RU-vid videos and Tweets / other platforms need clear awareness of financial protest. It just has to be spammed across all new trailers. Imagine being hyped over a game trailer then finding the comments section littered with legitimate links to proof of the developers being definitively immoral sexist racist bigot trash human beings. Not that this is the exact case with Nintendo, but to paint a picture to illustrate the point I do believe most people at the LEAST would reconsider the purchase and would let others in their circle know. Lastly, another form of protest suggestion than the commentary-only/radio style stream of tournaments I've been seeing is, we need to host "smash" tournaments and openly be playing every other platform fighter out there in conjunction with this. Rivals of Aether, Multiversus, Nickelodeon All Stars Brawl, etc. At that point Nintendo literally have no say over the matter and we can promote other communities, while raising awareness on Nintendo
i think we've lost other people losing money outside of the smash community. foot traffic in stores near the venue. airbnb's that got canceled. hotels that lost their people. flight companies losing the tickets. sure a good chunk of them are getting money back, but there's still a pretty significant loss for that as well. I'm considering straight up boycotting nintendo for this
That rant by about the parasitic nature of giant corporations was legendary and spot on. Fuck Nintendo. They didn’t create this scene and they don’t get to end it
The smash community should mass reach out to Sakurai. He's aware of the competitive scene and didn't like it at first, but enjoys it now. If enough people reach out, he might try and help.
I would say this isn't going to effect Nintendo's bottom line because when the next version is created us die hard fans will be the first to purchase it. They can decide if we're bluffing or not by the sales.
It's time to balance melee to revive interest. Nerf fox upair/upsmash, shorten marths grab range, take away one of puffs jumps, shorten shino invincibility. Stalling won't be possible and mid tiers will be more viable
I feel like there are two REAL "ways" to exist from here, and it's pretty much contingent on how much Big N cares to crack down on our normal ecosystem (Gensis, Big House, and +1 major whether its a Summit, Apex, Mainstage, whatEVER). 1) if they DO indeed crack down on our normal, non-partnered non-LCS non-bigwig non-corporate regional-to-major events, then we should BAND TOGETHER as a monetary UNIT (honestly, depending on the few big money actors we have in Ludwig, Mang0, Hbox, etc.) and legit just be THE first legal battle for this type of thing. Maybe this seems like a crazy take but, who the hell else is more equipped to do this? Where else will a MORE dedicated community attempt to, once and for all, defeat their masters? We have the prestige and (in some places) the _dosh_. Why not be the frontrunners in this type of "intellectual property' court case? I understand what we have to lose. But I also... want to see this precedence change, for everyone. Feel free to comment and say "you're a fucking idiot" if you know more legal shit than I do, but like... where the fuck can we take power? When? Where? How? Do we need some $6,000,000 court fund? Please discuss this below, because I think it's important. 2) Alternatively, the above DOESN'T need to happen; and we're FINE. It's totally possible that Big N was only shook because of Dr. Alan and all the shit that we're saying now. But like... this is kind of a "hopefully this happens" thing due to the circumstances. I kind of think NoA will fall back after all of this given the backlash. However there is a world where they don't and they go ham. What then? I just feel like it has been a long time coming and we are (unfortunately) the BEST community to combat this BS. I also think no ONE person, no content creator, no comptetor, no TO, etc., should have to fund this but like... it's not JUST Melee. It's P+. It's speed running. It's Smash 64. It's people that play on Yuzu to have some semblance of proper online competition in Ult. It's your friends from 6th grade that want to play Mario Party 5 on an emulator because you can't travel across the fucking country to play ONE VIDEO GAME THAT'S 17 YEARS OLD IN 2023. Like, where the fuck do we draw the line and try to do something? PLEASE talk about this below. I think it's important to have discourse about, regardless of your position in the melee community or your knowledge on the circumstance. How do you feel?
Appreciate your energy, but don't think $6 million monetary fund for some kind of law suit is the way to go. Nintendo is a hugeeeeeee multiBILLION dollar company. Also it's not clear anything is illegal here, they play the fine line of 'go apply to be officially Nintendo licensed' and 'oh you're trying to apply but we have no obligation to be timely, so if you announce it yourself we can say to the public you fell through on your end not our fault because we have official ways of doing things' The thing is it's not even just Nintendo. A big issue is our platforms. Nintendo doesn't just cease and desist the tournament. They send those to twitch and RU-vid too. Twitch and RU-vid don't want a legal battle with anyone and play it safe just autoremove (RU-vidrs had issues with monetizing content in general, good example is music or literally Nintendo RU-vidrs nonsmash). I'm sure twitch / RU-vid Terms of Service are set so we the people can't target them. And Nintendo targeting them is easy enough. It makes sense why Twitch / RU-vid does this, they just say it's not their fight why risk getting involved. Overall getting off these platforms pushes the scene to obscurity. If it isn't mainstream it isn't sponsored, it doesn't get financial support, people can't make it their full time living to be a pro player, community growth stagnates without mainstream content, future members of the community no longer exist, the community starts shrinking instead of growing, the game isn't pushed to it's limits, etc. My thoughts are we have to be vocal about this. Going from smaller to larger, we need all melee people, to all smashers, to all Nintendo players, to all gamers in general, to all streamers and RU-vidrs to get involved from as many spaces as we can. Ludwig, Alpharad, Mr Beast, Pewdiepie, etc are all realistically within possibility. Next to having awareness the bottom line is cutting into profits. You just gotta stop financially supporting Nintendo by buying idk Pokemon. There needs to be clear financial protest and that is the most current obvious IP. All new Nintendo RU-vid videos need clear awareness of financial protest. We need to host "smash" tournaments and openly be playing every other platform fighter out there. Rivals of Aether, Multiversus, Nickelodeon All Stars Brawl, etc.
Pretty sure they already started cancelling stuff. It's really difficult (and expensive) to rebook the venue and tickets etc. Plus they had in writing that they wouldn't be allowed to host this event. A news outlet quoting an unnamed spokesperson has much less validity than direct communication.
we need the legal sphere of youtube (imagine legal eagle or something covering this shit) to get interested in the potential case or something lol idk just keep adding eyes to this situation
If panda really thought they could actually forsake the competitive scene for the normie audience its just like?? Who exactly are you gonna get to play at your events??? You know the thing people actually go to them for casual or no.
I mean if Nintendo had some brain, they could simply sell melee on virtual console on each new platform and force people to play on official console. That would control the scene but at least they get some money out of this...
I agree with scar I love the existence of melee (even though I haven't played in well over a decade) Ive always loved vanilla and pure things and the fact that after 20 years a yoshi wins a supermajor, something that has never ever been done shows how amazing this game is. It's constantly changing, why? Because of updates? Because of DLC? because of mods? No its just the frigging players and the players alone that change the game and I'm so glad I got a taste of the pre-update world of gaming back when what you bought stayed exactly as you bought it.
