As the Dragon Ball FighterZ World Tour is approaching its climax a growing rain cloud seems to have emerged over the competitive scene.
Multiple events have been shut down with little to no articulated reasoning. Many are turning their attention to Japanese animation studio Toei as the most likely motivator for said shut downs.
Maximilian has produced a video wherein he recaps the recent goings on and then offers a handful of his own thoughts on the matter, recalling somewhat similar situations with Nintendo and Super Smash Bros. Melee a few years back.
Max states that he feels the competitive Dragon Ball FighterZ scene is feeling the effects of this in no small way right now, and that the whole ordeal feels very unfortunate considering just how popular a tournament game DBFZ has become.
Indeed even EVO tournament organizer Joey "Mr. Wizard" Cuellar took to Twitter on Friday to say, "It's sad to see what's happening to the DragonBall FighterZ community. It literally might be a one and done," perhaps implying there's a chance we won't see DBFZ return to the fighting genre's biggest recurring major in 2019.
The hit fighting game of this year, Dragon Ball FighterZ, is running into some issues recently in the esports world. Major tournaments such as EVO Japan and (most recently) Anime Ascension are not running tournaments for the fighter, leaving speculation as to why:
Many fans seem to be pointing the blame at Toei, the license holder for Dragon Ball. For those that arent aware of how protective Toei is, the company once had Japans Embassy write a note to Mexicos Government to prevent an illegal broadcast of Dragon Ball Super from being publicly displayed in Mexico. So the possibility that Toei could be putting the breaks on non-official Dragon Ball FighterZ tournaments to protect their IP, is not surprising.
Whats interesting is this is all happening in the midst of the Dragon Ball FighterZ World Tour, Bandai Namcos official esports tour for the fighting game. That tournament series itself is getting some flack due to the fact you need to win a Dragon Ball in the tournament to qualify for the finals. That would be fine if the fact that player Kazunoko did some gatekeeping and won four of the possible seven. This resulted in now four last chance qualifiers happening simultaneously to get some players to fill the finals.