Nintendo Turns Down Ninja’s Offer

Ninja, a popular streamer, claims Nintendo turned down his generous offer of $500,000 to help out at EVO. 

The legendary Twitch personality discussed an event that occurred between him and the popular Japanese video game studio while appearing on a livestream hosted on the YouTube channel Hustler Casino Live. 

To put things in perspective, EVO is an annual fighting game event. Popular publishers host their most popular fighting games for gamers to participate in, with a large reward pool for the winners. Mortal Kombat, Tekken, and, of course, the Super Smash Bros series are among the featured titles that have frequently appeared in the competition. 

Ninja offered the gaming behemoth $500,000 to help up the prize pool for Smash Bros. a few years back. Despite being a single-platform title, this iconic platform fighter series is one of the best-selling fighting games with a large following. Nintendo, on the other hand, never responded to his offer. In the video, Ludwig Ahgren, a Smash Bros. influencer, is quoted as saying; “That was on Nintendo, not me. I literally wanted to juice Evo [by] $500k, and they just ghosted us. I know I get memed about it all the time, but at the end of the day, I sat there in front of my team and I was like, ‘I want to make this happen, big money’ and Nintendo just never got back to us.”

Ninja announced something interesting for the Smash Bros community in 2018, therefore the contract was most likely proposed around that time. However, due to the publisher’s lack of interest, nothing came of it. He did say they were interested for a moment, but after his Tweet got out there, he was disregarded. 

Ninja also stated that his decision was influenced by his love and appreciation for the fighting game community.