Beyond the Summit’s Super Smash Bros. Ultimate 
invitational tournament, Smash Ultimate Summit, gave a little bit of life to Super Smash Bros. viewership on Twitch last week with 1.5M hours watched for the event that spanned March 8-10.
Though the tournament boasted one of the largest prize pools to date for Ultimate with a singles prize pool of $51.9K USD, 81% of which was crowdfunded, it lacked some of the prestige and reputation associated with an event like Genesis from earlier this year.
While Genesis 6 left a mark with 3.67M hours watched on Twitch averaging 38.91K concurrent viewers, Beyond the Summit’s event took a lighter spin on esports with fun being the focus in the first days of competition.
Instead of having hardcore competition throughout the weekend, Friday and Saturday were filled with wacky side events leading up to the main slate of competitive matchups on Sunday.
As a result, main coverage on Friday and Saturday averaged 30.37K CCV and 38.25K CCV, respectively. Sunday’s 12 hours of live coverage averaged 46.71K CCV, peaking at 69.98K. Overall coverage of the event throughout the weekend averaged 17.73K CCV, lower than Genesis’s primary channel for Twitch coverage.
While the event didn’t quite match Genesis 6, it exclusively included competition in Ultimate. Genesis has events in numerous other Super Smash Bros. titles as well. Beyond the Summit’s focus on Ultimate shows the organizer’s faith in the new title that was surrounded by hype when it was released in December as the first major Super Smash Bros. title to come out since Brawl in 2008.
Though the title ultimately didn’t end up having quite the influencer-driven power required to carry it into being a regular top form of content on Twitch, using interesting and silly side event formats, Beyond the Summit was able to differentiate itself enough to engage viewers despite only having events for one single fighting game throughout the weekend.
