In everyday life, except for a few people, people need a dependable source of income in order to survive. If there was one problem for those competing in Smash competitively, it would be the lack of a pot prize.
When competing in a smash tournament, one is expected to pay for registration, which can go from as low as priceless to as expensive as a few hundred dollars. These fees do not include housing fees and travel fees. What ends up happening is that most players who go to major tournaments will lose hundreds of dollars. Even those who place in the top one percentile may also lose money as the costs for travel will be greater than the pot.
I have been talking about the pot prize a lot, but most people will not realize how much the first place winner of the tournament may earn. With the recent release of the prize pool for Evo Japan 2020, the Smash community is in shock. The amount of entrants in the tournament for Smash is around 3,000 players while Street Fighter has nearly 1,500 entrants, half of that of Smash. Converted to USD currency, the first place prize for Street Fighter is $9000. To everyone’s surprise, the first place winner of a major tournament is a Nintendo Switch Pro Controller with a gold mark.
While it is cool that the Pro Controller will have a gold mark, it is tragic that the first place winner of such a competitive event will essentially lose money for participating. In general, if you compare the prize pool and amount of entrants in a tourney, one will notice something strange about Smash tournaments. Their prize pools are tragically small. There are reasons for this. For one, it was only in the last decade that Nintendo has recognized the competitive scene. For a while, Nintendo prevented the streaming of Smash tournaments on the internet and denied the competitive scenes existence. However, with Smash Ultimate, they have recognized the competitive scenes existence and often tweet about major tournaments on their twitter account.
On the other hand, Nintendo has not funded a tournament. This has resulted in most tournament organizers having to find sponsors themselves. Although what ends up happening is that the tournaments are underfunded in comparison to tournaments of other Esports. Recently, an organization known as Thunder Gaming has been funding a few tournaments with a lot of cash. The entrant of a company into the Smash scene has brought a lot of suspicion as in the past, a company entered the scene and never paid players. It has had a lot of issues due to some issues in its production and the companies spiteful twitlonger against Technicals who claimed that Thunder Gaming had ulterior motives. These claims were not helped by Thunder Gamings PR Team who wanted no opposition to them online and often took everything as criticism.
While the Smash scene is getting more money nowadays than it did in the past, the amount its top players earn is ridiculously low compared to that of other esports. Smash players would like new sources of money, but are often skeptical of new sources of money due to some past companies from not paying out. Nintendo does not help in this as Nintendo only provides minor support to the scene.
FutureGamingPro 