Nintendo demanded that the Smash World Tour cease operations without warning, and that's why the tournament has been canceled.
The fighting game competition was one of the largest in the scene. Smash World Tour said in a statement that it was the largest tour in history for any game title with over 325,000 entrants. The Championship prize pool would have been the largest in Smash history.
The championship was due to take place between December 9th and 11th, with tournament organizers getting notice of the shutdown the night before Thanksgiving, despite Nintendo having allegedly offered the event a licensing agreement in November last year. The offer came after the announcement of the Panda Cup, a tournament circuit for Super Smash Bros.
The panda partnership was not exclusive by Nintendo.
According to the open letter from SWT, Nintendo was being consistently consistent and that they made it clear that the panda partnership was not exclusive. The statement claims that Alan Bunney sabotaged the Smash World Tour by telling them that the event was being shut down and that the Panda Cup wouldn't be allowed to be on the Smash.
In a statement to Kotaku, Nintendo said, "Unfortunately after continuous conversations with Smash World Tour, and after giving the same deep consideration we apply to any potential partner, we were not able to come to an agreement with SWT for a full circuit." The negative impact on the players who were already planning to participate was the reason why Nintendo didn't request any changes to or cancellation of the remaining events.
The SWT team claims to have asked Nintendo multiple times if they had considered the implications of canceling the Championships as well as next year's Tour and that Nintendo "affirmed that they had considered all variables."
Nintendo shut down a Super Smash Bros. tournament in 2020 after forcing grassroots competition to stop using its games. The world's largest fighting game tournament was ordered to shut down by Nintendo before it was reversed.
The Smash World Tour said it will lose hundreds of thousands of dollars as a result of the shutdown, but reassured attendees that they will be given refunds.
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