Are majors lowkey dead? Since the conclusion of Riptide, it appears that we have very few big tournaments left in the year. Not too long ago, we could rely on The Big House to carry us through, and even last year, we had Don’t Park on the Grass to essentially step up to the plate as the last big open major. In 2025 though, the vibe check certainly seems different about majors, at least if you listen to top players talk about it.
I found this discussion very interesting, so I wanted to jump in and explore this topic in great detail. In today’s column, I’m going to break down the current state of affairs in Melee’s entire tournament ecosystem. I’ll be bringing up some statistics behind the tournaments left on the Melee calendar for this year.
What’s Coming Up?
Not counting Full House 2025, an invitational tournament, Melee has had eight majors this year. In order, they are Genesis X2, Battle of BC 7, Nouns Bowl 2025, Tipped Off 16, GOML: Forever, Supernova 2025, Collision 2025, and Riptide 2025. With Nouns Bowl as an exception, each of these series are recurrent majors of this decade.
EDITOR’S NOTE: I initially compiled these numbers over the weekend. It’s possible that these numbers (as well as notable entrants) have changed since. For example, with Beehive, I’d be very surprised if OkayP did not enter.
| Tournament | Date | Region | Melee Count | Current Top 3 Seeds Listed |
| The Big Abbey 2 | 9/20 | NorCal | 127 | Aura Graves Azel |
| Beehive 2.0 | 9/20 | Utah | 51 | Dawson Stiv |
| Quebecup 2025 | 10/4 | Quebec | 156 | Zain Cody Schwab Hungrybox |
| Teaglach | 10/9 | Ireland | 121 | Joshman Soonsay SluG |
| Frame 17 | 10/11 | Upstate New York | 108 | Zanya BING |
| Divine Intervention | 10/11 | Connecticut | 64 | SDJ Kalvar Nairial |
| INYIM #31 | 10/26 | Virginia | 54 | Kevin Maples Maelstrom Juicebox |
| 2Big2Dawg | 10/25 | Seattle | 53 | Salt Aura Stiv |
| Tidal Waves #5 | 11/8 | Ottawa | 59 | Zuppy Squid Lunar Dusk |
| Fast Fall$ 2025 | 11/8 | Niagara Falls, NY | 50 | Zain Cody Schwab moky |
I want to be clear: it is great that organizers in obscure Smash regions like Ireland, Utah, and Ottawa are able to draw noteworthy out-of-region talent, as well as sustain regional interest. Personally, I will be watching each of those respective events with a close eye and think it’s awesome news that their tournaments are becoming bigger. However, strictly from a major ecosystem perspective, there are only two tournaments here that feel like they could be majors: Quebecup and Fast Fall$. Let’s examine what makes these events a little different from each other.
Quebecup is a big success for its namesake regional scene. I think it has a good chance to be the biggest tournament that’s ever happened in the area. Along with its top player draw, this event has garnered plenty of Canadian signups too. If it ended up being a more consistent part of the Melee tourney ecosystem, it would also essentially be a third big Canadian event right under GOML in Ontario and Battle of BC in Vancouver. Granted, there’s other successful regional series across the continent – like, say, Kings of Hali or Tidal Waves – but this is to say that if Quebecup runs well, it has a chance to return and give Canada another recurrent major in a different area.
I do not share this type of enthusiasm toward Fast Fall$. This tournament has come with very shady circumstances like scheduling over a planned Pat’s House sequel, which ended up being cancelled. Although that hasn’t stopped this event from drawing top players, in some ways, this works against the appeal of Fast Fall$ to players outside the top echelon. My understanding is that the highest placing player here who isn’t invited to the Nounsvitational will get an invite, but anyone who attends and is trying to win the invite will run the risk of potentially losing to two invitees in infuriating fashion. In fairness, top-heavy yet small majors like these have existed before in Melee – see, for example, GT-X 2018 or Lost Tech City – and there’s still two months before people register.
After these tournaments, I noted three other ones that I found interesting enough to warrant mention because as of when I checked them, they did not have public entrant counts. These open events, in order, are Luminosity Makes Moves Miami 2025 (10/10), Somnio Noctem (10/31), and VacationLAN (11/1). Based on my knowledge of these events, I would expect VacationLAN and Somnio Noctem to fit in the “50 to 70” person regional range. And while I believe it will be a major, I have no idea what’s going on with LMMM. The presence of Zain, Hungrybox, and moky in the attendance list seems to suggest that it will be a major, but we’ll see what the final attendance count ends up being. My guess is that it probably holds steady around 2024 numbers, but this is totally speculation on my behalf.
Excluding these three events, I found 10 weekend tournaments for the rest of the year that had 50 or more confirmed Melee entrants. In total, they had a combined 843 entrants. In terms of ‘likely major attendants,’ the current‘confirmed’ number of these 10 tournaments is 216. On the surface, these numbers are a very disappointing turn from what’s otherwise been a very promising decade for major and regional attendance in the fall.
| Fall Season (After Riptide to End of SSBMRank season) | Confirmed Events with >50 Entrants | Confirmed Events with >=100 Entrants | Confirmed Total Singles | Average Singles |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 34 | 15 | 5019 | 147.6 |
| 2023 | 28 | 14 | 4199 | 150.0 |
| 2024 | 21 | 9 | 3216 | 153.1 |
| 2025 | 10 | 4 | 843 | 84.3 |
This looks pretty bad, doesn’t it? But I do think there are good reasons to hold back the doom and gloom. One of them, as mentioned before, is how many of these tournaments are at least a month away from happening, which is right before registration numbers start to add up. Anecdotally within my research, I also found plenty of events that technically missed the 50-entrant criteria but are in a good position to top it by the time they actually happen.
With these reasons considered, it’s possible that the ecosystem’s current struggles are more due to random chance and the disadvantage that comes with my methodology (looking at existing entrants right now). Besides, on a broader level, I think there’s reason to believe Melee’s holding steadier than these numbers indicate.
Big Event Attendance Trends
I’ve broken this down in previous columns – usually when major attendance was doing quite well. With that said though, I think this has taken a turn for the worse and I’m going to show you how. In the next table, I am going to count the number of majors for each year, as well as add any tournaments that crossed 200 entrants. I’ve moved the criteria to this level from 50 plus entrants just to contain what I’m looking at from “very big regional” to “supermajor” rather than possibly a “notable regional to supermajor” due to the gap in my previous methodology.
| Year | Big Events | Total Entrant Count (SSBM) | Average Entrant Count (SSBM) |
| 2022 | 18 | 8,138 | 452.11 |
| 2023 | 17 | 8,591 | 505.35 |
| 2024 | 17 | 8,496 | 499.76 |
| Current 2025 (with three months left) | 13 | 7,306 | 562 |
Surprise, surprise – the numbers look fine (although I think the average entrant count is extremely inflated by the presence of Supernova). However when we limit our criteria to just open majors, the landscape looks significantly different.
| Year | Open Majors | Total Entrant Count (SSBM) | Average Entrant Count (SSBM) |
| 2022 | 12 | 6,601 | 550.08 |
| 2023 | 11 | 7,088 | 644.36 |
| 2024 | 11 | 6,918 | 628.91 |
| Current 2025 (with three months left) | 8 | 6,192 | 774 |
Psych – it doesn’t. All in all, we’ve seen a greater consolidation among the majors for recurrent events. Again, the 2025 average numbers are disproportionately skewed by Supernova – the literal largest major of all-time – but I would personally say that the typical “open major” is really not that much different from previous years of this decade. I think we’ll probably end this year with about 10 or 11 open majors and finish with somewhere around the same total entrant count that we had in 2022. And remember: that’s just majors.
More than just Genesis and Supernova being successful series, I’m encouraged by the presence of other majors, as well as what appears to be the scene’s deep “bench.” These are tournaments like Full Bloom, Altitude Sickness, Fight Pitt, CEO, Valhalla, and Combo Breaker, among other events. And that’s not to forget the possibility of Don’t Park on the Grass coming back at some point in the future, or even Wavelength, which delayed its event to 2026 after its sudden burst to prominence in 2024. If any one of Collision, Riptide, Battle of BC, or GOML don’t return, there are a lot of events that can step up to the plate (though preferably they could all co-exist).
At worst, I think Melee weekend tourney attendance – including regional and majors – will have hit a slight drop in entrants by the end of the year. At best, it’s probably doing fine, and while the fall does look pretty bad, it’s started too soon for me to draw definitive conclusions. Viewership, however, is a whole other story; we may be totally screwed there. In my next column, I’m going to talk about what I feel like is a pretty bad sign for majors in the post-Summit era and discuss ways of breaking the tide.