Nintendo Shuts Down Smash World Tour, Organizers 'Losing Hundreds Of Thousands Of Dollars' - Kotaku

The organisers of the Smash World Tour have today announced that they are being shut down after Nintendo, “without any warning”, told them they could “no longer operate”.

In 2022 alone, we connected over 6,400 live events worldwide, with over 325,000 in-person entrants, making the Smash World Tour (SWT, or the Tour) the largest esports tour in history, for any game title.

The 2023 Smash World Tour planned to have a prize pool of over $350,000.

That being said, we are taking steps to remedy many issues that have arisen from canceling the upcoming Smash World Tour Championships — Especially for the players.

In addition to Nintendo now stipulating that tournaments could only run with an official license—something SWT had not been successful applying for—the team also allege that Panda went around undermining them to the organisers of individual events (the World Tour would have been an umbrella linking these together), and that while Nintendo continued saying nice things to their faces, Panda had told these grassroost organisers that the Smash World Tour was definitely getting shut down, which made them reluctant to come onboard