• Hey Guest. Check out your NeoGAF Wrapped 2025 results here!

Why does Nintendo hate eSports?

nightfly

Member
I really don't understand the hate they have for it. If anything all it does is give a large platform to show off their games, yet it's obvious they hate it with a passion, why?
 
Nintendo looking at adult Smash players and Pokemon card and Amibo collectors
daniel-plainview-see-nothing-worth-liking.gif
 
Nintendo had aspirations, remember the Switch reveal trailer? It had a lengthy e-sports bit towards the end.
Maybe it's a product of its time, maybe they just sucked at it, a little bit of column A, a little bit of column B.


(timestamp).

200w.gif
 
They just don't care for the most part, splatoon is the only exception and that's pretty low effort.
Then the smash community is embarrassing, while Sakurai thinks smash should be a party game.
 
Nintendo is it's own biggest platform. It's directs reach millions of live viewers at only a day's notice. It's franchises are some of the highest grossing across all media. One can walk into a random village in a developing and find people who know Mario and Pikachu by face. Nintendo has no need to subsidize an esport program to achieve it's goals.
 
I used to like competitive online games, then gaming expanded to the normies and everything went to crap. I'm not suggesting this as cause and effect, just a lot of enshittifying all at once.

That being said, Nintendo has a pretty big library of party games that could be esports it they actually wanted to, but thankfully they don't.
 
Brawl-Tripping.gif


No better example to show that they hate it. No, "hate" is too gentle of a word. Despised is a more appropriate word to describe Nintendo's feeling about anything remotely competitive. Especially in regards to the Smash community.
 
Because the whole idea of e-sports is just idiotic.

Gaming tournaments have been a thing since the beginning but in the end is not the companies but we the players the ones that decides what games to play. Most if not all games that where designed to be e-sports have failed because companies never understood that Halo 3, CS, Smash Bros, DOTA was fun to play at first, THEN people start to take it seriousness.
 
Most likely because:
  • Nintendo knows they can't completely financially control it
  • They don't make that many games that could be esports
  • They don't want to deal with the drama that would hurt their image as the safe company for families
  • Enough esports are struggling to maintain themselves financially, even the ones with decent viewership.
 
Top Bottom