Something pretty crazy happened last February, and no, it’s not Cody Schwab winning Genesis. For the first time in a whole ass year, Super Smash Bros. Melee cleared one million watch monthly time hours on Twitch. In fact, the year-long Melee spectator decline has been the most brutal one we’ve ever had as a community. It coincides neatly with the fact that 2023 was the worst recorded year for Twitch viewership in all of Melee history.
If you’ve read this column enough times, you’ll know that I love talking about viewership. I don’t think it’s the only factor that goes into making a healthy scene, but it does matter, and more importantly, I think it’s fun to talk about. Coming off a year where we lost our biggest invitational series and stream channel, the litany of factors that go into Melee’s viewership decline are pretty obvious (losing Beyond the Summit, losing Smash Summit, our best invitational series, and, for whatever it’s worth, losing multiple circuits). Of course we were going to struggle in this one department.
However, today, I’m not here to talk about how Melee sucks. I’m not even necessarily talking about viewership. Instead, I want to talk about another key indicator for the scene’s health: attendance at tournaments, and what that’s broadly looked like over the last two years. We can sometimes take this one for granted, because it’s too obvious, but this matters too.
Major Attendance
Initially, I only wanted to look at major attendance, as they are the most easily classifiable type of event. Now, as a community, we tend to hyperfocus on whether a tournament is or isn’t a major, and I think that sometimes misses the forest for the trees. At the same time, I understand the appeal of discussing the implicit hierarchy of our tournament ecosystem. For the purpose of this column, I am only counting majors as they are dubbed by Liquipedia. I don’t always agree with them; it just makes for a clean distinction. Keeping this in mind, let’s take a look at how each recurring major tournament series has performed from 2022 to 2023.
NOTE: I have also excluded hybrid events like the Ludwig Smash Invitational and LACS 5, as they just don’t really make for clean comparison points due to the unusual formats.
From 2022 to the end of 2023, almost every recurring major tournament series saw a slight uptick in Melee attendance. The sole exception to this rule was Genesis, which reached 1552 entrants in 2022 (many of whom ended up DQ’ing), its delayed return following the pandemic. For what it’s worth, this year’s Genesis brought 1544 entrants, basically an almost negligent difference from Genesis 8. Out of curiosity, I examined 2019 for prior years for these recurring series, and the net increase of attendance included Genesis. In terms of major attendance, you can’t ask for much more than this.
Or can we? I decided to examine what major attendance has looked like in the SSBMRank era (discounting the pandemic years), and overall, we’re looking pretty good. It’s not quite the peak of Melee (this would be 2016 to 2018, right before Ultimate’s release), but if anything, we’re nicely recovering from the decline we had in the pandemic (and Ultimate) era. People are not attending majors as much as they did in the renaissance period; and yet, it’s still going fairly steady.
Now, I would not go as far as to say that the community is in a better overall position today than it was two years ago. Back then, we had circuits, better viewership, and, broadly speaking, money. Furthermore, many of the 2023 majors are not coming back in 2024. It would be foolish to look at major attendance as the only measure of a community’s health.
At the same time, however, we shouldn’t be too harsh on ourselves. In this particular category, we’ve done alright for ourselves. It speaks volumes to our scene, as well as our game, that after all this time, people still want to attend our biggest events. Believe it or not, our largest tournament organizers are not incompetent buffoons. They run tournaments that people enjoy enough to keep going.
What Does Non-Major Attendance Look Like?
I decided to examine what this would look like at the “non major” caliber of events, only this time, only over the last two years and only examining weekend events. I determined these through a mix of perusing When’s Melee, reviewing the headliner events that weren’t majors, seeing if it lined up with the largest events of each weekend, and making judgment calls on what counted and what didn’t.
What I found was that it was, more or less, roughly around the same level. I wouldn’t confidently state that regionals are definitely more exciting today than they were a year ago, but we have enough information, in my mind, to say that they haven’t suffered too much. I’d need to look into specific details behind these events (such as top player representation, region-specific factors, recurrent nature of some regional series, etc) to say anything else.
Local Attendance: Two Years of Verdugo
Naturally, the next thing I wanted to do was look at locals. After considering it, however, the daunting nature of this task shortly hit me. I don’t have the time or resources to take a look at every local. Instead, I decided to take a look at the growth of Verdugo over the last two years.While it was not easy to keep track of every single local, I instead decided to use the Verdugos that Fiction attended (the vast majority of them) as proxy to examine attendance rates over the last two years, starting from January 2022 to the most recent Verdugo as of when I wrote this column.
Obviously, one local is not going to prove that “locals are back” or necessarily prove anything on a global scale. I just wanted to share it as a positive example of a reasonably successful local and what that would look like to people during this time span. It may not apply for all regional scenes, but it’s certainly something that SoCal should be proud of.
Considerations For Next Time/Future Research
- I don’t really have a good conclusion or way of tying everything together. Next time I do this, I should spend more time planning what I want to examine or testing some kind of hypothesis I have before sharing information into the void.
- It may be worth acknowledging the number of majors per year next time, or assessing the relationship between that and the number of major attendants. Do more majors distribute the attendance or does a rising tide lift all boats?
- What relationship does broader tournament attendance have with the attendance of top players? Does the presence of major contenders have a measurable impact on people’s willingness to attend events?
- Is there any relationship between major attendance and watch time hours – or the presence of major contenders at events and watch time hours?
- Examining any trends that exist from 2022 to now when it comes to The Nightclub, Recovery, or other locals that I looked at as part of the Eggwin Awards.
Resources
- Sullygnome
- Liquipedia
- When’s Melee
- My Metrics Sheet (warning: it’s very messy)