they just had big enough turnouts for nintendo to notice
and a documentary
edit: also a much more tight knit community due to local fests and MEETING people unlike tf2

well we got half of it.

The entire smash community revolves around competitive. Only a small mostly unknown portion play competitive TF2. All big "Esports" started with games that were comp-centric. Valve doesn't care about that. Valve wants to make money.

But we also get recognition, albeit, minimal, because SOMEBODY posts those messages about tournaments on the Teamfortress website.

the comp smash scene is a lot bigger than the comp tf2 scene especially relative to the overall playerbase

the situations aren't really that similar outside of neither dev really acknowledging that the competitive scene exists.

I think that getting a small fighting game community to gain momentum is a bit easier than a game like TF2. Having local communities is a lot easier when you just need a TV, console and each player to bring a controller to get things going. I think the same goes for reeling in new players since someone can practice a fighting game alone easier than TF2 since a lot of the game involves team play.

Tf2 is a team game, smash isn't outside of doubles.

nintendo still doesn't really give a shit about melee though

Well first off, smash is alot bigger and alot more popular than TF2 is.

Nintendo and Sakurai have never liked the fact that "competitive" smash brothers is a thing. For the longest while, particularly after brawl's release, Melee dying, similarly to how alot of people see TF2 right now, but it managed to hang in then cause there were still a good number of people that wanted to keep playing.

Melee started getting popular again with the rise of tournaments such as RoM (Revival of Melee) and people dropping brawl and picking melee back up. At this point Nintendo still doesn't really care about the competitive scene or supporting it. So for the longest time, the Melee scene, just like TF2, is pretty much supporting itself (ignoring some of the old MLG events that melee was at).

So now we're up to the beginning of 2013 and Evo is wanting to pick up another game for their summer line up, and the way that they felt they could see people show their support for which game (as there were multiple nominees) was to see who could donate the most for whichever cancer foundation was picked at the time. So Melee players managed to donate something like over 100K and barely beat out Skullgirls and was put back into the Evo lineup for the first time since 2007. Oh, I also forgot to mention that Nintendo threatened to prevent the streaming of Melee at Evo but thankfully we were able to persuade them to let us stream it.

Evo 2013 was a big success in terms of exposure (something like 100K+ people watched), same with Apex 2014. Lots and lots of exposure is a big thing. Exposure plus the fact that around this time alot of the top level players are getting sponsored by actually esports organizations (EG, Cloud 9, Curse, etc). TF2 seemingly does not have either of these things in really any form, we get low twitch stream viewers on both events and invite level player streams and not really anyone except for a couple of teams are sponsored in any big way.

You mentioned the "For Glory" mode that is in the new smash game. Yes, it is a gesture to the competitive players of the game. However, the way that it is implemented does not seem to show that Nintendo particularly cares about competitive as the only stage is Final Destination, and while yes, there are no items on, the fact the this is the ONLY stage that can be played really makes it pointless. And even with this "For Glory" mode, Nintendo still isn't super thrilled about competitive smash in general. They are starting to warm up to it more and more but its still in the works.

With this said, and considering that Valve also has Dota 2 and CSGO as their other "real" competitive platforms (remember Nintendo really only has smash bros unless you count Melee/Brawl/PM/Smash 4 as all separate things which is fair to a degree), its hard to imagine that TF2 will be able to break the mold in the same way that Melee did. It just doesn't have the viewership or the support and interest of people willing to put money into players and teams.

If people really want TF2 to be able to get that second wind that Melee did, we're gonna have to spread further than just pubs and newbie mixes. You guys want even the remote possibility of Valve giving a shit about TF2? Well you need to do something explosive on sites like Reddit, something that gives the internet and people like that a cause to fight for, to fight for us. Something that stirs up major interest points of the internet that says "Hey, it's not just those people on tftv that want and support these things". TF2 has to be the talk of the internet if you want Valve's support on this one.

There's a tournament in pretty much every city every week, whether it be a local at someone's house down the street, or a national tournament in a convention center. More events make it easier for people to get into the game.

Also, the for glory mode was not a shoutout to the competitive community of smash.

It's a lot easier to organize games that are played 1v1. An interested player can tinker in "competitive" smash without really making any commitment. For tf2 you need to commit to a team in order to contribute to the size of the scene, and that scares people.

I think competitive TF2's biggest issue is how okay it is with slowly bleeding out. there's a lot of excuses being made that are trying to skirt around the bigger issue, that issue being that beyond a handful of important players, players don't want to help support all that much. for'real, y'all genuinely believe the ruleset a bunch of dudes built out of trial-and-error for a decade is more popular than any other form of melee, a game that sold 7 million copies? don't be ridiculous, in the grand scheme of things melee's competitive play was quite tiny, but community leaders were stubborn about keeping their support. you don't get that breast cancer drive loaded without a strong core, after all.

one of the most depressing things I saw from this community so far was in the thread regarding lange, where players just kind of assumed people would come to these communities naturally by virtue of them existing, and there's no reason to ever care otherwise. do you realize the implications of those statements, how incredibly bad that looks for anyone who cares about helping? that's pretty saddening to see, I'd say.

going back to that cancer drive for a moment. one incredibly important factor in melee winning that came from bobby scarnewman (dude who now works at twitch, PeoplesChamp etc). people like him, and prog, and so many of the top players for melee poured their heart and soul into making everyone watch his stream and prepare for a massive outpour on the final day. I remember trying not to scream in the middle of the night when it was announced melee won that, and just thinking internally, "holy shit, imagine the things our community can do when we put our effort together like this!".

and then everything else in 2013 and beyond happened because of this, and that was that. this is a really important factor that smash as a community has, and you can see it everywhere. do what you can, promote tournaments that are happening, teach people about the game, talk and discuss with others publicly. maybe the dude who talks about tournaments all the time on twitter isn't on the level of someone like prog and d1, a commentary duo that introduced so many new players into the depth of the game, but any support is good support, and he's giving it out.

see that "comp.tf" tag people've been rocking recently? that might not make you lange, or tagg or cbear or admirable. but there's an important, notable chance that you might get a good pub player to ask your about it, and you can help them, and that is exactly one more person who is in this community than before. you do not believe how much that can add up over time. it's small, but it can work, because even a slight hint of effort can take you god damn everywhere.

one more point I want to make, when regarding smash: officially, nintendo did not officially acknowledge smash's competitive scene until earlier this summer. that's about a year and a half past the ball starting to roll, a year and a half after we started to get noticed on a large scale. official support's nice, but it doesn't beat a mass community effort, no matter what.

source: am smash player
not very GOOD, mind, but I know enough about what I'm in to explain

it's a console game so it's way easier to set up events

it is not easy to set up smash events at all

it's a lot easier than setting up tf2 events

it's pretty easy to notice smash when it's at a tournament as big as EVO

Fighting game communities are very tight-knit.

THIS. The number of comments I have read in all of these threads that have given any number of reasons why we shouldn't try to do something. Or suggesting that something has been tried before, so doing it again is pointless. Even in this thread, listing off all the ways in which the 2 scenes are too different from any of the lessons from one to apply to the other.

JUST STOP. Seriously, stop. We are small because we seem to only want to be small. If we wanted to be big we wouldn't list off all the reasons why we can't be big. We'd have a goal, and we would work at that goal in any and every way that we could think of. Regardless of how effective those methods were.

Sure, if you have a really good idea, that is going to be more effective than previous ideas. Promote it, make it known, get people to jump on board with it. But if you are just going to shoot down someone's suggestion without offering some, better, alternative, than please, just stop. You don't need to make that post to feel important, or in the know. (and even if you are suggesting an alternative, potentially better, solution you still don't need to shoot down any other suggestions. People will gravitate towards the community efforts that are making the most progress, doing the most good. And if they want to support your idea as well as some other, less effective idea, then let them)

the only difficult thing about smash events was finding a reasonable venue, making sure the pot didn't get stolen, and actually finishing on time

everyone brought in set ups because it usually resulted in no venue fee (so you're basically paying $5-10 per set up brought as a tournament organizer, which is really good considering you're basically renting stations for entire days for $5-10)

it was easy to set up tournaments and see who was planning to show up because of sites like smashboards and allisbrawl (lol)

i helped/participated/traveled out to a ton of smash tournaments

the reason the melee scene got completely revived was because of evo as others have already said, it brought a lot of hype and everything just perfectly fell in place to give smash a ton of exposure that it needed to survive thanks to the community, the casters, and pretty much everyone that donated anything to the drive to get smash into evo

the reason nintendo got involved is because they wanted to cancel the streaming of smash since it wasn't an officially licensed nintendo event (and people were basically exchanging money by entering the tournament, which nintendo hates), and it put a really bad light on them after they saw how much support the game got after their decision -- enough to reverse it; after evo's success, nintendo just figured that this was actually a really good thing and now support these big tournament scenes

being hosted at evo opened up many other events/venues that were hosted by the mainstream fgc groups that usually only played games like marvel, street fighter, injustice, and so on, which just added on to the overall exposure of the game

smash has always had one of the most tight-knit communities, but i can't say that the tf2 community doesn't also remind me of the smash community, which is probably why i've stuck around for so long

as melee players have shown, the game will never die as long as someone out there plays it