By any metric, 2022 was one of the best years for competitive Melee in terms of attendance and viewership. Along with what I wrote last week about over 5,000 entrants dispersed throughout the major, national, and regional scenes, it was an incredible year for viewership. This is largely due to the presence of two competing circuits, as well as a scene-unifier of sorts in Beyond the Summit. Sure, the year ended with the dissolution of those two circuits, as well as a whole list of other issues, but the beginning of 2023 still offered promise. After January, the same month in which Jmook won Genesis in electrifying fashion, Melee had had its fourth straight month of having one million watch time hours on Twitch.
A lot has changed since. Beyond the Summit is no longer around. Jmook is not winning Genesis. But more specifically, the landscape surrounding Melee’s viewership ecosystem has taken a turn for the worse. Ever since January 2023, Melee has failed to hit one million watch time hours for a single month. For last week’s column, I wrote that attendance trends were relatively okay for Melee, but in my opinion the same can’t be said about its status as a streamed game.
In today’s column, I’m going to talk about viewership for Melee, why it matters, what the data tells us, and where the scene could go moving forward in this area. I’ll also try to offer some behind the scenes insight into why viewership has declined and what factors are influencing the current state of affairs in this one metric. I will be largely focusing on Twitch-driven statistics recorded by Sullygnome, with an emphasis on watch time hours.
Why Viewership Matters
I’ve written about this topic seemingly every year, so I’ll try to keep this section short. Essentially, for any form of broadcast competition – be it traditional sports, pro gaming, or really anything else – the events that hold them have a list of revenue drivers. To speak very broadly, ticket sales are one way to make money, and another way to make money is from sponsorships and advertisements.
In most sports, the way these factors come into play is through broadcast rights. The National Football League, for example, holds the rights to all broadcast footage of its games, which are streamed to millions of viewers. Advertisers for companies that believe their products or services can be pitched to this audience will pay events money in exchange for being able to sell them. Melee, however, is different in that no event really owns their footage – Nintendo does.
Naturally, that makes for a very tricky situation for tournaments, and one that certainly has its fair share of problems. How can tournament organizers convince sponsors to give them money in exchange for being featured on a broadcast featuring intellectual property that they don’t really own? Obviously, as a Melee player, I have a very distorted view on this topic when it comes to my personal ethics. But from Nintendo’s perspective, the company prioritizes two things about everything else: control over IP and ‘good enough’ press. Keeping this in mind, Smash tournaments and Nintendo have a complicated, previously adversarial, but now hostage-and-corporate-forced-hug type of situation.
To briefly detour, Nintendo will look the other way if an event is small enough to not force their hand. But for majors, this company will not-so-gently remind them that they need to apply for a license or risk further action. Nonetheless, tournaments do try their best to gain sponsors, explain their situation, promise them that everything’s cool and that the reward of paying them for sponsorships is worth the risk of the event potentially getting shut down in a worst case scenario. Despite the fact that Smash tournaments don’t really own broadcast rights the same way that professional sports leagues do, advertisements and stream sponsorships are an important source of revenue.
General Trends
From 2022’s peak of 13.41 million watch hours, Melee’s Twitch viewership has dropped to 7.95 million in 2023, 6.85 million in 2024, and currently sits at 4.42 million through August 2025. The steepest fall came immediately after the shutdown of Beyond the Summit, which left a vacuum in centralized broadcasting and promotion. The loss of Mang0 as an active tournament draw has also dimmed the spotlight. At the same time though, the year-over-year slide has slowed; 2025 is tracking close to 2024’s totals, which suggests the ecosystem may be finding a new baseline rather than free-falling.
I also think there’s one silver lining: the huge downward shift in monthly standard deviation for watch hours. From 2022 to 2025, that number’s gone down from roughly 439.35 thousand to 95.33 thousand. The optimist in me wants to believe that this suggests Melee’s average viewership numbers are hitting a floor before an eventual rise. I ran a t-test comparing 2024 watch time hour numbers to 2025 watch time hour numbers, and by that same metric, there’s roughly an 82.97 percent chance that any difference in average watch time hours is by random chance. If the year ends with a slight decline, it’s still in the same ballpark – hardly the 2022 to 2023 dropoff. All considered, it’s not too bad or surprising.
Factors Influencing Changes in Viewership
For this section of the column, I’m going to examine whom the biggest channels in Melee have been from 2022 to now. Remember that these numbers are calculated to account for the existence of secondary streams as well. As an example, btssmash2 is counted as part of the btssmash Twitch channel, and the same goes for VGBootCamp secondary channels as well.
The biggest problem lies in who the leading channels actually are. The top two of the top ten since 2022 belong to a dead studio and a banned player; a third, while still active, no longer has a global circuit. The rest are mostly individual “Melee influencer” streams, rather than institutions. Some events have even leaned on these top player channels to carry broadcasts, but that model brings long-term risks and hasn’t been all that successful. Although it can help events find revenue in the short-term, it leaves organizers with little long-term leverage in negotiations and no durable broadcast infrastructure. I would honestly compare the use of top player channels for big events to having a higher prize pot – there is a certain ‘logic’ to it that makes sense, but it doesn’t really solve an underlying problem.
Speaking of which, majors have now turned inward when it comes to their own content. For examples, Genesis now streams through genesisgg, and Collision through CollisionSeriesTV. Melee has never had a totally consolidated broadcast ecosystem – as both btssmash and VGBootCamp were in the picture during the glory days of 2022 – but certainly that landscape was better for viewership than the current one filled with what I like to call tournament ‘fiefdoms.’ On paper this gives tournaments more control over their content, but in practice, it contributes to audience fragmentation and limits Melee’s collective reach.
Considerations
Melee is an exciting game with personalities worth celebrating beyond Mang0 and Hungrybox. What makes the current struggles of the scene so frustrating is that community leaders are working hard with real constraints to their efforts. One of the biggest is money, as the sponsorship well that briefly produced the Papa Johns circuit has run dry. Nouns is the rare outside group to invest, but its presence has been a mixed bag at best.
From an outsider’s perspective, the situation looks even tougher: no one owns the IP, the game’s most famous player is banned, and one of the scene’s most recognizable figures passed away in tragic fashion. Against that backdrop, it’s easy to see why new investors are hesitant. Tournament organizers, especially at the regional and national level, have shifted their focus to sustaining in-person experiences rather than chasing centralized broadcast solutions. Given the current climate, you can’t really blame them.
That said, I think there are reasons to be optimistic. Like I mentioned before, after a sharp decline, viewership has stabilized, suggesting the scene may have found a floor. Historically, Melee has moved in cycles: boom periods (2014 to 2018, 2021 to 2022) followed by busts (2019 to 20, 2023 to now). By that logic, another spark could be around the corner, at least if history repeats itself. In the meantime, opportunities exist at the regional level. Events could experiment with local sponsorships or work with large Melee YouTubers like turndownforwalt, whose reach is still underutilized.
There’s also room for a new multimedia hub in the vein of Golden Guardians or Radio Melee. The way I see it is that this new group would be a brand that could connect tournament coverage, content, and community news under one umbrella and in full-time capacity. Honestly, maybe we just harass Walt to start a podcast or something. I’m sure this sentence is going to fry some people’s brains here, but the guy has over 150,000 subscribers on YouTube; even if his content is not your thing, he is strangely the closest thing we have to a centralized repository for community content.
The current state of viewership is nothing to celebrate. But it is, after all, just one metric. And while I am worried about it to an extent, I also think it’s worth accepting Melee for what it is as a community-driven ecosystem. It does not ‘need’ centralization or a professional environment for it to still matter to the people in it. If something feels missing, anyone can step in to create it. Whether viewership rises again, what matters most is the relationship each person builds with the scene, how they choose to engage with it, and the time they spend with the people who matter to them. Still though; it’d be nice to have more people watching our game.