Melee future speculation

So 2015 is the second year now that melee is not only an Esport but a pretty popular one at that. This was the first year in quite some time that we see other players catching up to the “gods of melee”. We saw PewPewU defeat Hungrybox in January at Apex 2015, Plup defeated Mango at Evo 2015, Westballz defeated mango at a California local in 2 straight sets in grand finals and of course who could forget Leffen’s rise. With so many of the other players catching up to the top player’s one can only wonder what 2016 will hold for melee. Now as we all know melee is a game that has been around for quite some time now, in December it will reach age 14, and yet even with being out for so long melee continues to grow. A huge question is if this growth will continue in 2016, will we see even bigger numbers at tournaments? Or will things maybe see a slow decline, with the way things have been going in past years though this doesn’t seem to be the case and of course as a fan I want melee to continue to prosper. Even so it still is always a question on everyone’s mind. Now let’s talk about the players. We’ve really started to see a few of the gods start to decline. Most notably Mew2king and Mango. Mew2king’s hands were bothering him at one point in this year, specifically his fingers, he claimed it would hurt to play melee. As for mango we have seen a very inconsistent year from him this year and while having won a few tournaments such as Press Start and Paragon his placings have been dropping form a usual consistent top 3 to now placing more around the 4-8 spots and on a few occasions not even making it to top 8 in such tournaments as HTC Throwdown were he lost to DruggedFox in winners and MacD in losers. Now having been following melee for a very long time it doesn’t surprise me that we are seeing these 2 decline a little bit before everyone else In the top 6, both of them have been playing competitively longer than the other gods and are also the two oldest of the group. I’m being completely serious though, Mango and Mew2king had been winning tournaments since before anyone even knew the names of the other top 4, especially mew2king as he competed way back in the day with notable players such as Ken and PC Chris. So will we see these 2 start to really decline? Perhaps one of them will retire? Or will they completely make me look like a fool and continue to dominate? Now we could speculate about 2016 for hours but I guess we will only truly know when the time comes. Just going to have to wait and see.

(Players mentioned here that were not shown or talked about in the top player introduction post)

MacD

DruggedFox

Ken

PC Chris

Something to note about both PC Chris and Ken is that although they are old school players both have made appearances in recent years especially Ken as he actually returned to competitive play in 2012 and is even a sponsored player now.