Super Smash Bros. Ultimate won’t be appearing at renowned fighting game event EVO this year, and it’ll be missed by players and streamers alike. Even big names like Ninja wanted to see it happen, but his pitch was not accepted by Nintendo.
The news came out during a high-stakes poker game featuring several streamers on the Hustler Casino Live YouTube channel. Nearly six hours in, Ludwig asked Ninja when he would help the Smash Bros. community. “I wanted to juice EVO for like 500K,” was his response. “I wanted to get Nintendo’s permission, and they ghosted us. That was on Nintendo, not me.” Nintendo isn’t required to work with Ninja by any means, but it is odd that it totally ignored such a big influencer in the game sphere.
The reason is most likely Nintendo’s new partnership with Panda Global. Announced last fall, the collaboration will bring the first officially-licensed Super Smash Bros. circuit to North America. We don’t know when Ninja’s EVO pitch was sent to Nintendo, but the circuit plan seems to have taken precedent.
Smash Ultimate itself received its final fighter adjustments in update 13.0.01 last December. The future of the series is up in the air, as key designer Masahiro Sakurai is undecided on whether to produce another one. At the very least, he stated that the series needs to stop depending on him so much.
