EVO is to the fighting game community as the Super Bowl is to American football fans. Every year, hundreds of thousands of fans tune in to the Evolution Championship Series tournament to watch the best professionals battle it out for supremacy. After being acquired by Sony last year, EVO has announced its lineup of games for later this year with one notable but expected removal.
Street Fighter V and Tekken 7 will headline EVO 2022 with Mortal Kombat 11 Ultimate and Guilty Gear Strive rounding out the lineup. Other games include Dragon Ball FighterZ, The King of Fighters XV, Granblue Fantasy: Versus, Skullgirls: 2nd Encore, and Melty Blood: Type Lumina. None of these games come as a surprise inclusion as most if not all are widely considered one of the best fighting games around. However, the removal of Super Smash Bros from the lineup generated discussion even if it was expected.
There have been rumblings within the fighting game community for a while about how Nintendo wanted to pull Smash from EVO. One of the presumed reasons for this is the recent controversy surrounding the Smash competitive scene that involved reports of sexual harassment and abuse as well as the grooming of minors. Not to mention, it's an open secret among fighting game circles that Nintendo never prioritized the competitive aspect of Smash. It appears that the Sony acquisition finally gave Nintendo an out.