2014-03-30, 10:20 AM
Lozmaster Wrote:Let's not kid ourselves.
Melees growth is almost solely due to project M being mostly completed over the last year bringing it back into the spotlight. It won't be growing more in any seriously significant way, otherwise it wouldn't have taken 10+years to do it.
Actually, no.
100% of the growth is attributed to two things. 1) The smash documentary inspiring tons of retired veterans to return as well as a massive wave of new players, and 2) Melee's struggle to be played at last years evo where it was the most watched game at the event causing it to be picked up again by competitive gaming TOs for the tournaments occurring this year. Both of these things only happened within the last 6 months of 2013.
People don't joke when they say melee never stops being a new game. aMSa the yoshi player came into the scene at last evo and he placed NINTH IN THE WORLD at apex this year despite only having less than a year of competitive experience and playing a low tier character like yoshi. He consistently and convincingly tore apart a ton of top players that no one expected him to beat with technology and a play style no one had seen before. Everyone was so impressed after the tournament they had an entire event where they pit everyone they could against him in 1v1s and they all lost. 2013 was also "the year of luigi" because we had a few really really top level luigis coming out and showing what luigi can do against fox/falco. When it comes to awesome videos like wombo combo and rom m2k vs shiz, there was one moment that happened not even two weeks ago (lord vs s2j falcon round robin) that got >50k views on youtube in less than 20 hours and people say it's better than wombo combo. As the game gets older people come out and further advance the meta game to show that melee only gets more balanced with age.
P:M did have influence in that it created the bridge between brawl and melee causing the competitive scene for the series as a whole to increase, but it hasn't had anywhere close to the effect that those two things have had.