Esports in my hometown of Oakland, CA. Photo credit: @tempusrob

I made a bold prediction last Thursday, just before Genesis 6 began: the event would reach 250,000 concurrent viewers at it’s peak on Twitch.

That milestone would truly be historic. The only fighting game event to reach such a high watermark in this past has been Evolution, the most highly regarded tournament series in all of the fighting game community, which has been running for over 20 years. And no other event has ever come close.

Genesis 6, or Genesix as some are calling it, ended up shattering all viewership records for any Smash Bros or fighting game tournament in general outside of Evo.

The only catch — it still fell short of my prediction by almost 100,000 viewers.

By my count:

The event peaked at 168,409 during the Melee finals between Axe and HungryBox, and then again at 166,643 viewers during the first half of Smash Bros. Ultimate’s top 8.

Despite the fact that my prediction was way, way, wayyyy off, the Smash, fighting game, and esports communities should be ecstatic about Genesis 6’s record breaking viewership (Genesis 5 peaked at around 130,000 concurrents I’m told).

This is huge. But I’d be lying if I said this peak satisfied my craving for absurd growth.

You might ask:

So Ben, why were your predictions so damn optimistic?

First of all… who am I to make such a prediction?

Second of all, how dare you.

Jokes aside, I might be the most qualified person on the planet to predict esports viewership. This may sound conceited, but it was actually part of my job for more than 5 years when I worked at Twitch, and according to some data science friends, my prediction ranges were correct more than 90% of the time.

Anywho, less about me, more about Ultimate.

Ultimate hype

In Nintendo‘s Q4 earning report, they announced that Smash Ultimate sold 12 million copies in less than a single month, from December 7th-31st.

It’s hard to explain how nutty this is. Smash Ultimate may very well be the best selling “premium” ($50+ pricetag) game of all time, including games like Minecraft, Halo, and Call of Duty. It has certainly sold millions more copies since then. If even 2% of everyone who owns Ultimate were to tune in, we’d easily smash through 250k.

The game’s good

I’ll be the first to admit that my gametime in Smash 4 and Brawl pale in comparison to 64 and Melee. I just didn’t love those games in the same way.

Ultimate, on the other hand, has consumed me. Every night for weeks I’ve grabbed my brother to play hours of 1v1s or grind online. The skill ceiling and number of matchups clearly put Ultimate into the highest tier of skill-based esports titles. I even decided to enter the Ultimate tournament at Genesis I’ve been having so much fun (went 2–2 btw — everything I could have hoped for).

The first “major”

In my mind, Ultimate at Genesis 6 was ramping up to be the apex (you get to decide if that pun was intended) of 18 years of Smash Bros history.

After the release of Brawl, Melee seemed to always have a bit of a superiority complex over newer Smash titles. But here we were, with a brand new game, and the gods of both Smash 4 AND Melee were going to face off against each other. Come on, the story lines write themselves!

Yet, after the dust settled, it was still Melee that brought the most viewers.