Since the game was first announced last year, Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl has drawn a lot of comparisons to Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros. franchise. Most notably, many fans have called it a “Smash Killer,” and that joke often gets sarcastically recycled when new fighters are revealed. Such was the case when Hugh Neutron was revealed recently, and developer Ludosity has asked the game’s fans to stop doing just that. Programmer Thaddeus Crews has said that while he’s not personally bothered by these comparisons, they instigate conflict and cause ramifications for the team, and for the game itself.ย
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“There’s no real way to not come off as a buzzkill in addressing this, but the image this kind of message creates has been so thoroughly harmful to a degree that I can’t just sit back and watch it happen again,” Crews wrote on Twitter. “I strongly encourage finding hyperbolic absurdist statements elsewhere.”
Crews went on to say that he wants to “broadly shift away from the implicit competitions those statements frame.” While the developer notes that the comparisons started as absurdist, they’ve become “warped and cruel.” In other words, he wants Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl to be judged on its own merits, rather than being negatively compared to one of the biggest franchises in all of gaming.
It’s not difficult to see how that could cause problems for the developers, overall morale, and even for the game’s sales. Some streamers, such as Colin “IntroSpektive” Firth, have already pledged to stop making these types of comparisons in the future. Crews is well aware that he can’t stop anyone from making these types of jokes, but hopefully his comments will help people think about the impact these comparisons have had on the game and the team working on it.
Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl is now available on Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and PC. You can check out all of our previous coverage of the game right here.
Have you checked out Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl yet? What do you think of these comparisons? Let us know in the comments or share your thoughts directly on Twitter at @Marcdachamp to talk all things gaming!
