Smash Bros. has sustained a vibrant and growing competitive community.
"Just recently we held Apex2012, it was the largest Smash tournament to date, with over 700 unique players across the three Smash games," wrote AlphaZealot. “400 entered Brawl, over 320 entered Melee, and 64 entered Smash64 because of a capped bracket. People say the community is dying all the time and have for years, going back to when MLG first dropped the game in 2006. It seems that people love to say that about Smash because it has plenty of detractors, but in spite of it all the community continues to chug along. I think part of the reason is because it is the best selling modern fighting game – with over 10 million copies sold. Therefore there is almost always new players/blood to pick up the slack. Smash is strong.”
An enormous source of growth in several major esports has been live video streaming of the sort you’d find at TwitchTV and Own3d. Smash streams, on the other hand, are in their "infancy" and have only developed any sort of serious following in recent months. Apex 2012’s 7,000 concurrent viewers during the Melee tournament is the highest the franchise has reached.
Websites such as Smashboards and AllisBrawl are often as active and visited as Shoryuken, the traditional fighting game’s main hub, despite the fact that Smash has not had a new game in four years.
In terms of prizes offered, Smash has put up very respectable numbers.
"However, the power of the Smash community isn’t the once-a-year large tournament, it is the near weekly local or regional events," wrote AlphaZealot. “If you check out the Smash rankings for example, you can see that a player like Ally or Mew2King has placed top three and won money at over 30 different tournaments in a 52 week period – and this is underreported! In all likelihood these players are attending a tournament roughly 40 weekends a year and winning between $200 and $1,000 at every single one of them (because Smash runs both Singles and Doubles, the prize money can quickly add up). Looking at the data since 2005, it would be a reasonable estimate to assume that dozens of Smash players make over $10,000 a year, many over $20,000, and a few between $30,000 and $40,000 a year. All this without endorsement money.”
As previously mentioned, Smash (without MLG) offered roughly $400,000 in prizes at 600 events in North America in a single year between 2008 and 2009. In the past year (2011), just over 500 tournaments were held.
"Looking at this and other data I’ve collected over the years, I’d estimate Brawl alone after four years is approaching the one and quarter million prize threshold between singles and doubles," wrote AlphaZealot. “Obviously this can’t compare with $1 million DotA prize pools and some of the things StarCraft has seen, but when compared to other fighters it is more than adequate to put the game in the top 3 since its release prize wise, and if you were to factor in Melee events (not just Brawl) that numbers rises once again. On average though Melee has about 100 tournaments a year now, roughly 1/5th of what Brawl has, but the community is still healthy for a 10 year old game, having just held it’s second largest tournament ever with 320+ entrants!”
*Smash *is strong.