Steve has been controversial in Smash Bros for a while now, but that’s been whipped up to a fever in recent weeks. It’s been enough for the topic of a ban to become a serious discussion. It started with Collision. They were the first to outright ban the character. More recently a Coinbox Steve ban has been announced.

More new tech for Steve was recently discovered, and that’s on top of his already fairly OP kit. Steve is now looking like one of the more unbalanced characters in the game, sitting at the top of the Smash Ultimate tier list.

Hungrybox is behind Smash Bros events like Coinbox as well as being one of the top Smash Bros players. Coinbox is a real highlight for Smash Bros, with regular tournaments that allow fans to never be far away from a hype competition. Now that it’s including Melee too it’s bigger than ever. The fate of Steve at these tournaments was just announced in a recent stream.

In a Thursday night stream, Hungrybox announced that Steve would be banned from Coinbox tournaments going forward. He cited problems with monitoring games on a large scale when banning specific tech, as well as the many local Smash organizers who had already banned the character.

As Hungrybox went through in his stream, local Smash groups have already started banning Steve in pretty high numbers. Where the scene snowballs on a rule change like this, it becomes a lot fairer to discuss it on a nationwide level.

In the past, Smash rules were basically decided this way. Fans and players don’t like something, so a few tournaments ban it. Then more tournaments ban it. Eventually, so many events are on board that it causes problems to have a different rule set.

The Coinbox Steve ban is just one tournament. With others experimenting with bans and the reaction to this ruling being quite positive though, it might be the start of a nationwide Steve ban.

Other regions have different rules though. Japanese Steve players are some of the best playing right now. Major circuits are still not replaced from 2022’s fiascos. Add to this different rule sets being used in different regions, and future international-scale competitions could be difficult.