Nintendo Cleans House, Removes Lewd Smash Stages

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate brought the Stage Builder back in its 3.0 update, and wow, did some people ever abuse it. Some rather inappropriate stages were erected using the mode, leading to calls for Nintendo to sanitize the situation. Now it has.

According to Nintendo Life, Nintendo has started to remove a number of the more questionable custom stages from Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, but the outlet reports that a few still remain. This is, no doubt, going to be difficult for Nintendo to police. The company would essentially have to review every single stage upload from Smash, and there's no telling how fast those are coming in, or in what quantity. As fast as one inappropriate stage is taken down, another could go up, and as long as players are able to create their own stages and share them with the world, that is going to be the case.

It certainly seems like Nintendo needs some kind of penalty for those who share explicit stages, if not to remove bad actors, then to dissuade people from creating those stages in the first place. Then again, you know Nintendo and online — the company isn't very good at it. It's as though Nintendo is saying, "Sure! Go ahead and build a bunch of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate stages and turn our custom stage gallery into Jonah Hill's notebook from Superbad." But when it comes to implementing voice chat in the lobby of a Mario Kart 8 match? How dare you! Think of the children!

There's been no official word from Nintendo about the scourge of inappropriate stages in Smash, nor has the company commented on its removal of these stages. But it's not all that different from Nintendo's experience with Miiverse. The company tried where it could to keep things clean, but at some point, you could end up seeing something you didn't want to. Eventually, players just learned to live with it. That could end up being what happens here.

We'll let you know if we hear anything more on Nintendo's strategy for the situation.