Nintendo were going to block Melee's 2013 Evo showing Melee was given a spot then Evo's organizers were contacted by Nintendo's legal team to pull the game, like it or not they could have if they wanted to as bad PR is nothing new to them as ultimately they give permission in the end not the Melee fans whether Melee fans want to see it that way or not.

Again you're not reading the post and only seeing what you want to see, rather then read the fact that growth in EU is different to US because of how the scene is over here you some how read "S4 is bigger then Melee" which wasn't even said I don't know whether you didn't understand the post or just didn't read it properly, firstly Evo uses the NTSC version at that level the changes between the two versions are significant and change match ups. For example Peach is favoured against Fox in the EU version but in the NTSC version it's more Fox favoured and this is all on top of the different in speed, when you have a situation like this where versions of games have such changes and tournaments use different sets of rules it can be a bit farcial as it becomes a hurdle for EU players and why the Smash community is only just now coming together over here, heck Mang0 had to switch to Falco when he was in EU as he said he couldn't get used to the PAL Fox. Every player wants to go to Evo and win yet you're faced with an issue of flying there to play a different version that has runs at a slightly different speed.

Hundreds of EU players travel to other tournaments around the world for other games but Smash because of these issues, S4 has a much smoother platform to launch from as players do not require to meet up for competitive play and the is one universal version through out, this is why growth in the EU will be more open to games that are non Melee then the US. Online is a key factor over here as most arcades vanished about a decade ago and communities are very elite and scarce, as a UK player I can't just hop over to France for a quick tournament, even your own numbers tell the story of how much smaller the community is over here in the EU as a result. Another thing that caught my eye in S4 was how players like Noelle Brown who are prominant in Marvel are playing it competitively and took part in the recent tournaments.

Hedra also highlighted another key factor in that S4 has something about it that encourages learning the game and exploring the mechanics unlike previous which were all players just messing around and discovering tricks, this encouragement with in the game helped games like SFIV, KI, BB etc... as new faces emerged in the community to drive the game and the For Glory mode helps nurture this. This is a factor over here as Melee's elite approach works against it some what here, Japan are used to having gaming communities and LAN style gatherings but Melee never became as prominent as a community over there by the looks of it, going by the documentary Melee has an elite approach over the as well.

Ok i'm obviously not going to convince you that Melee is going to stay around and you're obviously not going to convince me of the opposite.  The point of the EVO post was that EVO was going to host Melee regardless, Nintendo can't stop people from bringing gamecubes and playing the game, which the community would've done regardless.  We paid for those gamecubes and those Melee discs so it's not like Nintendo can confiscate them if we try to go to Vegas and play them.  The most Nintendo could do was stop EVO from streaming Melee which they tried to do.  As someone actually in the community trust me when I say most people have an extreme distrust of Nintendo intervention, even those who play SSB4.

Yes there are big differences between NTSC and PAL, but any European player traveling to EVO isn't going to change their decision simply because it's a different version.  I wasn't arguing whether there were differences or not I was just saying anyone willing to spend hundreds to travel across the Atlantic Ocean is dedicated enough to the point where the regional differences won't dissuade them, and thus won't affect attendance.  Mango also plays falco as a secondary and actually plays falco exclusively against fox, he is extremely capable of playing multiple characters and winning tournaments (winning Big House 4 as falco/falcon/marth mainly, played very little fox, and beat a top 10 player, Hax, with falcon), so it's no surprise he played falco in Europe.  What he actually said (from what I know) was that the difference between NTSC fox and PAL fox is much bigger than the difference between NTSC falco and PAL falco so he chose falco.  But that's irrelevant, the point is that only about 20 Europeans are good enough/willing to travel to America to play in tournaments and the rest are perfectly content to stay in Europe and never worry about NTSC.  Thus the only possible attendance loss would be those top few Europeans, who are all good enough to place very very well in America regardless of regional differences (see Armada and Leffen).  Even with the hundreds of other players traveling to other fighting game tournaments, Melee is still the third largest fighting game in the world despite the regional differences and is poised to surpass  UMVC3 as the second (APEX 2015 Melee> EVO 2014 UMVC3, we will see what happens at EVO).  The regional similarity might help grow SSB4 faster, but it sure hasn't hurt Melee attendance.

Japan has always had a more prominent Brawl community than Melee community, so SSB4 is naturally more popular than Melee there so I'm not going to argue anything about Japan.  You have basically given a bunch of opinions about why you believe SSB4 is going to spread faster and why Melee is going to stop being popular, but the facts are that people said the exact same thing when Brawl came out and Melee survived Brawl and let's compare Melee post Brawl to Melee post SSB4.

# 100 person Melee Tournaments 2007: 15 (largest 270)

# 100 person Melee Tournaments 2008: 6 (largest 231) (Brawl released at the beginning of 2008)

Attendance at APEX 2009: Melee 52, Brawl 210

# 100 person Melee Tournaments in January 2015 alone: minimum of 10 including APEX(APEX, BEAST V, Norcal Arcadian, Paragon 2015, Sweet Prologue, Sweet 17, MVG Endgame, Mayhem, Super Nebulous, Smash for Smiles 2).  These are the ones I know of, there may or may not be more

# 100 person Melee Tournaments in every other January combined: 13

Attendance at APEX 2015: Melee 1037, SSB4 837

As you can see, Melee got absolutely obliterated in the aftermath of Brawl, whereas in the aftermath of SSB4 it is doing better than ever.  I think if it can survive getting out attended 4:1 in the first APEX following Brawl's release, then it can survive SSB4's release.  Yeah sure SSB4 has better online than Brawl ever had, but you can play Melee online for free, the only price is the controller adaptor whereas playing SSB4 online is about 400$.  Melee online actually has much less input lag than For Glory mode has (I think Anther's ladder is 3-4 frames on average), whereas my personal experience with for glory mode is about 7-8 frame input lag and slight frame skipping, which is why I only play SSB4 local.  Again I can't speak personally for Europe but if those are your impressions for the European scene I'm not going to argue with them, I'm just stating the numbers, and the numbers support Melee.

Anyways I think this argument has reached it's conclusion, if those numbers don't convince you of Melee's survival idk what will, and your opinions of why SSB4 is going to grow faster won't convince me that Melee will die, so we can just agree to disagree.

Yeah you definitely are right about a lot of Melee players fearing change and fearing new iterations.  I personally don't mind change.  I have tried all the new smash games, including Project M, and I play Melee because it is personally the most fun for me.  If Nintendo releases a smash that in my opinion (again only mine, not others) surpasses Melee, I wouldn't hesitate to switch.  Saying SSB4 and Brawl are more casual than Melee is an ignorant view among the Melee community and is only perpetuated by the slow and defensive gameplay in those games.  Brawl and SSB4 players try just as hard as Melee players to be elite and deserve recognition for it.

This may come off as Melee elitist but in my honest opinion the reason why people are playing on FD, no items, etc. and why for glory mode was created was because competitive Melee has now become a mainstream thing and it has influenced how people view the game.  When Brawl came out, Melee was very grassroots and not in the public eye, so people kinda just assumed that items and crazy stages was the way to play the game (that's certainly how it's marketed).  But once Melee became popular, people saw the competitive side, tried it, and a lot of people probably found it fun and decided that's how they wanted to play the game.  Other people probably tried it and went straight back to having all the crazy items on and stuff because it was less fun, and I have nothing against those people because they can play whichever game they want and the way they want.

SSB4 as a game was designed to be more competitive than Brawl, and most people say it's in between Brawl and Melee which I would argue is false.  I think it's more of a combination between Brawl and SSB64 because it has similar shield strength and airdodge mechanics of Brawl but the characters are about as fast as 64 characters, as well as fall speeds similar to SSB64.  Though it lacks the ridiculous 0 to death potential in 64, it has the same general pace of 64 (slightly faster than Brawl but still much slower than Melee), combined with the low hitstun and defensive mechanics of Brawl.  Of course it also introduces it's own new mechanics like rage and anti ledge-hogging that separate it.

As a casual player, if you are looking to get more into the competitive scene I would definitely watch the smash documentary (though it is very biased against Brawl), and watching Dr. PeePee vs Armada in APEX 2013 or Hbox vs Mango EVO 2014.  If you want to get more into SSB4 competitive scene you should probably watch BEAST V since Zero absolutely dominated APEX 2015 to the point where it wasn't really fun.

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.

Finally on Zero's victory, I've been watching him stream since the game came out he's actually one of the first players to explore S4's mechanics extensively along with Izaw. I see him practice a lot with M2k with many characters so he knew match ups well when going into Apex, much better then his opponents although the Olimar player really made that character fly.

Melee is a very sharp game. It isn't as clunky as you all may think. I consider it to be the 2nd best in the series. However, that's unnecessary.

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

U>Melee=3DS>Brawl>64

Which do you consider better?

That's really hard. I'd say smash Wii U. I was actually going for Brawl as they had neat and fleshed out modes (subspace). But I'm going with the Wii U version soley due to what it embraces the most, the gameplay. What I mean by this is how smooth the fighting is and how robust the character moves are. I hate everything else about the game (although it is very well crafted). There's not much to do besides fighting but the game does it and it does it very well.

Yeah I actually really liked subspace emissary cause I could play it with my brother and it felt at least sort of like a real campaign, even though most people I talked to didn't like it because they felt it took up unnecessary space in the game.  I actually feel like the WiiU gameplay is less smooth than Brawls is, I mean the animations and stuff are a lot better but they added a lot of landing lag on moves and airdodges (as well as getting rid of ledge cancels, DACUS, and DJC, but not sure if that means anything to you).  The opposite is actually true for me in WiiU, I really enjoy all the extra modes, besides smash tour.  A lot of the modes like classic and events are two player now which I feel should've been added a while back, and they brought back coin battles which are probably my favorite thing to do in Melee when I'm not playing competitively.