The organizers of the Smash World Tour have announced that both the Smash World Tour 2022 Finals and 2023 events have been canceled due to licensing issues with Nintendo. The Championships were held without an official license thus far, however, Nintendo informed third-party organizers that they could no longer operate future events."Without any warning, we received notice the night before Thanksgiving from Nintendo that we could no longer operate. This was especially shocking given our discourse with Nintendo over the past twelve months. Since then, we have been working around the clock to take the proper steps logistically, as well as to prepare this statement with proper legal guidance", reads the announcement. The team behind the Smash World Tour said they are devastated that the Tour is being taken away.
Smash World Tour was set to run its annual fan tournament between December 9th and 11th, where thousands of fans would join the event to support their favorite competitors. The circuit was regarded as the largest Super Smash eSports competition run by the SWT team. In addition, it would have had the biggest prize pool in Smash history at $250,000 this year.
It's conceivable that the partnership between Nintendo and Panda Cub led to the Smash World Tour's cancelation. "We truly thought we might be getting shut down given the fact that they now had a licensed competing circuit and partner in Panda", the organizers wrote in the announcement.
According to the SWT team, they will lose a significant amount of money due to affected contracts and sponsor obligations. They will also need to address a number of issues brought on by the cancelation of the Smash World Tour Championships. On top of that, the SWT team noted what makes the cancelation even more disappointing is the approach Nintendo took in recent weeks. "We have requested multiple times to communicate with them directly, but these requests were not granted."
However, a Nintendo spokesperson told a different story to Kotaku, saying: "Unfortunately after continuous conversations with Smash World Tour, and after giving the same deep consideration we apply to any potential partner, we were unable to come to an agreement with SWT for a full circuit in 2023. Nintendo did not request any changes to or cancelation of remaining events in 2022."