It was not at all meant to be a big announcement, you guys blew it out of proportion. He just wanted to recap this past week and what he gleaned from talking to Nintendo reps, Reggie, and the Treehouse folks.
Summary: First, prog talked about how the invited players were chosen. He said that he was contacted by a Nintendo rep and apparently Nintendo was already doing their own research on top players. They had already been watching the scene from afar for an unknown amount of time and apparently, prog suggests that they (some Nintendo reps) are likely hidden around on places like the MIOM Facebook group, here, smashboards, and so on.
Continuing on, he said that he sent them a list along with where they could find the players and what they've done. Apparently Nintendo is a huge fan of the APEX series so that explains Crismas' involvement as being chosen. Beyond that, once he had sent that list off (which also included Brawl players) it was up to Nintendo from there which lead to the players we got for the Invitational. Basically, you can't blame prog for the end result.
After that he talked about how much Nintendo knows about the competitive scene. He didn't name names but Nintendo reps on Twitter have reacted to some of our tournaments such as SKTAR 3, APEX, and so on. Then he went on to talk about Reggie and Treehouse in particular, this is where things get interesting.
Prog said that in his talks with them, both Reggie and Treehouse really love what we've been doing the past year to grow the competitive scene. He even said that some of the Treehouse folks (or just some Nintendo reps, the stream sort of got a little muffled) had donated to the Breast Cancer Research last year for EVO 2013. And he basically ended on saying that we should continue to do what we've been doing to grow the community, using pidgezero_one as an example where she brought business cards to one of the Best Buy Smash-Fests to hand out to people at the event to get them interested in their local scene.
Finally, he talked about Project M. Before I go on here, you needn't worry: prog believes the Nintendo (at least the reps he spoke to, this isn't a company-wide policy) are not going to shut down PM. All prog said was that they are aware of it and are even intrigued by it. However, due to the legal implications involved with it Nintendo is not going to do anything about it. They are going to remain hands off and... "let it rock" so to speak. However, that doesn't mean Nintendo supports it as they don't and will not officially acknowledge it (hence why Peachyhime's accomplishments could not be mentioned, they don't want to detract people from the new game: Smash 4).
Oh and one last thing: future events by Nintendo are absolutely possible and prog thinks they might do it based on how ecstatic Nintendo (the people at E3) were.
From questions from the chat, prog stated that Nintendo reps did take some feedback from them at E3 and they are interested in what we have to say. Prog even believes they will take our feedback to heart and try to relay it to the dev team/Sakurai. To be more precise, they had sent Nintendo reps e-mails about their feedback. This we will obviously have to see if it will happen but yeah, basically, prog is confident of this to some extent so you should try to be a little more optimistic rather than pessimistic (despite what the past has shown us, this is the Platinum Age after all
).Anyway, that's pretty much it! Let's just keep doing what we've been doing. Celebrate what we have right now in all the games we can play right now and keep the Smash hype train going (this goes for all games).
The rep also told him no johns.
