A team of four Melee enthusiasts bought a domain and formed a game company named after the most predictable buzzword possible. You can’t make this shit up folks. I’m surprised this subreddit hasn’t given up after that.

Now as much as I want to, I’m not going to doubt their ability to make a decent game. Prior development experience is vaguely described in the page’s About section. Making a game is hard and takes a long time, but anyone can do it with enough dedication. It’s pretty easy to make inaccurate guesses on a game’s quality when there’s no game demo available. Or a trailer. Or a gameplay video. Or a single screenshot. Or a title. Or even a basic idea of what the game will be like beyond “Platform Fighter”.

Let’s instead talk about how “Wavedash Studios” is presenting themselves and their priorities. According to their about page they are “here for one thing: to team with the community in creating the next great wave of competitive games”. 3 of the first 4 sentences of their “mission statement” I suppose contain the word ‘community’. They never promise they’ll make anything good, but it’ll be made by the community damn it! Everyone is the developer!

The developer bios are pretty funny. You can tell they’re hip and grassroots because they have tags in their names. And several of their information paragraphs start with how they like playing competitive smash bros, hiding their actual dev experience for the end. That is not how you inspire confidence in players/consumers. Names of universities they attended? Links to personal websites or portfolios showcasing prior work? Fuck that shit, did you know Matt “Scav” Fairchild hosted MOAST3? That’s what’s really important! There’s also one part about they took someone that frequently participates in Ludam Dares (event where a team of developers make a small game in 72 hours), and it was spun into “knows how to rapidly develop a polished game from the ground up”. Either that’s pure marketing bullshit, or the development team actually thinks that making a competent game over dozens of months is on the same level of doing little game jams. For their sake, I hope it’s the former.

100% of the posts made on all of their social media outlets (Twitter, as far as I can tell) are related to Smash or competitive gaming. Seriously it’s hard to tell if they’re even a game studio. Maybe this is all one big prank and it gets revealed they’re actually an esports reporting team.

All this says to me that these guys are more focused on just getting followers instead of actually being a game development studio. The way they’re praying off the insecure and easily excitable competitive smash community is disgusting, far from subtle, and shameful. Buzzfeed has articles that their cringey headlines link to. Wavedash Studios has nothing. Literally nothing! At least give us a screenshot or something!

Everyone that has at least a passing interest in platform fighters need to give this studio zero attention until they actually have something to show. Startup companies that like to talk big are nothing new, but to see so many members of the smash community buy into this crap… it’s fucking embarrassing. It really is. Don’t give them praise, demand examples of effort, and encourage others to do the same.