Less than 24 hours after Nintendo canceled the livestream for its Splatoon 2 North America Open event, the Splatoon community decided to host its own tournament.
Instead of going along with Nintendo’s decision, the top four NA teams withdrew from the qualifier and worked with event organizer EndGameTV to put on The Splat House, an independent event funded by the community.
FTWaveDash, formerly known as FTWin before grabbing the new handle to support the Super Smash Bros. Melee community, won it all, defending their NA title and becoming six-time consecutive North American Splatoon champions—considering the community is essentially replacing the NA Open’s results with The Splat House. The team didn’t drop a single game during their run.
The event served as a great showcase of top-level Splatoon gameplay, including multiple close games between the best teams in NA. And thanks to a mix of the Splatoon, Smash, and other communities coming together, The Splat House set the record for the biggest prize pool in Western Splatoon history at $25,000.
The tournament organizers actually capped the prize pool donations at $25,000 and will be giving the additional $3,000 that was raised to charity. That entire amount was raised in less than 24 hours through donations from the community and with no backing from Nintendo.
For the NA Open, Nintendo only offered trophies for the top four teams and 2,500 Nintendo Gold Points for teams fifth through eighth, continuing the tradition of the company putting little into prizing for its events.
The viewership numbers also broke Western records for the competitive Splatoon scene, bringing in an average of 5,388 viewers and hitting a peak of 7,689 viewers within just five hours, according to Twitchmetrics.
On top of that, all four teams that tied for fifth place in the NA Open decided to drop out rather than compete in the event, showing solidarity with the teams who were originally supposed to compete before the broadcast was canceled.
It’s still unclear how Nintendo will handle its competitive events moving forward now that it has disrupted multiple major tournaments due to Melee being involved in some capacity.
