| Wyrdness said:
I've already highlighted the flaw in comparing Brawl to S4, not only is the push a lot better with S4 as well as the game being deeper and all that which we've already touched upon but also the community situation. Many at the time believed Brawl was going to be Melee 2.0 when the game was being stripped down to be much more casual and party like, with S4 the community are still in the mind set of anything non Melee being casual as a result of what happened with Brawl, if the latter game was designed like S4 it's possible Melee may have not even been able to recover and survive being followed by a game that could be just as competitive and deep in mechanics as people were more willing to explore Brawl to master the meta game and try and make the transition. Stopping Melee from being streamed at Evo would have been a massive blow for Smash's exposure on all levels, the FGC only began to open up to the series after it was streamed with well respected commentator James Chen doing commentary, you could bring your GCs yes but the exposure wouldn't anywhere nears as much and Melee would continue to be more underground and elite. I don't know how exactly you're calculating costs as Melee being free to get online Wii U online is free and the cost of the console is a bit of a wonky point to bring up as people buy a platform for multiple games in a library on top of the one they want, if it's some homebrew method I don't think it can be classed as a viable point tbh, getting a GC game online in EU on GC well good luck I guess, I'm not familiar with how it's done in the US. Few Europeans would make the trip because of the changes and wayward scene over here, on equal grounds EU players have shown to be just as good as any NA player in any game we have an EU Evo champion in SFIV while no NA player has had that honour for reference. I'm willing to bet Amsa, Armada, leffen and the few others who make the trip play the NTSC version the majority of the time as the scene here is very elite and small with activity on just picking up over the last year, this is why Smash Europe was launched to bring the groups together and have a go to site for all Smash players. This is why the majority of tournaments go as far as to stick to a certain console version if the are even differences like speed so everyone knows which footing it's going to be played on. Numbers are good yes but they don't prove that Melee won't be replaced in the long run and that's the flaw in what you're arguing here as the numbers were good for the likes of MVC, MVC2, SF2, CVS, SF3 etc... I've seen it all before and don't believe the Melee fan's determination can avert this as I mentioned earlier even if Melee can run a long side S4 I can see another Smash game doing what SFIV did to S2 and taking the mechanics as a template to build on them in a new style which will result in Melee being retired by most much like SF2. Smash is doing what SF did in having multiple approaches to its concept, Sakurai won't go back to Melee's approach but another director will at which point it'll be S4 trying to survive the new game. |
Like I said, your mind is already decided and I can't change it with any facts I post so this argument is pointless now. The only question I have is if SSB4 has a much stronger pull than Brawl then why did Melee turnout tank the year of Brawl's release (2008 numbers in my last post), but has continued to improve practically exponentially following SSB4's release (2015 so far)? Again all you've given is opinions and referenced fighting games that aren't smash, (especially when most of the FGC doesn't consider us part of the FGC, which I don't mind at all because joining the mainstream FGC means probably selling out to Nintendo as of right now, hopefully Nintendo becomes more helpful in the future) but you have no actual numbers besides "these other games were big and then they collapsed". I'm willing to bet that the trends in smash games are more indicative of what will happen than trends in other fighting games. Another main difference is that those other fighting games were made specifically to be competitive games accomodating for casual play and had far fewer differences between versions than smash, whereas SSB4 was designed as a party game accomodating a competitive community. Compare Brawl/SSB4 and Melee and you will find the differences are much greater than between iterations of SSF or MK.
Playing Melee online requires downloading the dolphin emulator (free), downloading the Melee iso (free but technically illegal if you don't own Melee), any computer with reasonable processing power (2007 or later is probably good enough), and buying a gamecube controller adaptor ($15). Like I said it's basically free as long as you're willing to do something illegal (that you won't get caught for), and it also has equal or less lag than for glory mode. Playing SSB4 online requires at least $60 dollars for the game and $20 for the adaptor (unless you use wiimotes, which is usually banned at large tournaments due to signal interference). This is implying you already have a WiiU, and a lot of my smash friends are not Nintendo fans (in fact most of them own xbones, but love smash), and don't have WiiUs, so they have to dish out another 200-300 for that.
Nintendo stopping Melee from being streamed from EVO would've been a huge blow for Melee, but the point was they tried to stop it and thought there wouldn't be backlash but there obviously was. If they had chosen to honor that ban I personally would have lost respect for Nintendo and probably wouldn't own a WiiU right now, how much of an effect worldwide it would've had on them is debatable but considering that probably most FGC member who followed APEX would never buy Nintendo products again, and in the 5 hours they tried to cancel it, it was already plastered over every major gaming site like IGN, it probably would've been non negligible. The exposure from the ban probably helped grow Melee by itself tbh.
And yes I am well aware of the skill that European players possess, Armada is personally my second favorite player, but my point wasn't that Europeans couldn't compete, it was that the Europeans who are good enough to compete will compete regardless of regional differences. Also Japan is NTSC so Amsa plays NTSC, but that doesn't really matter.
Again it's always possible that your opinion comes true and that Melee does fail, but the data suggests otherwise and until the data shows Melee is going to fail then I'm going to have to assume that Melee will continue to survive.
*edit grammar
