While the Online Tournament Demo was going on and a few days after it finished, I noticed that a lot of people were commenting and excusing the connection issues by saying that this was supposed to be a network stress test and not a demo of how the game really would be. Actually, though, the Mario Tennis Aces Online Tournament Demo was just an advertisement. It was never intended to be a stress test and probably never used as one.
The reason why I’m so sure about this being just a big ad is simple. Online stress tests need to be that, stressful to the network. They need to be as harsh as possible with the servers and overall connections. They need to simulate a point in which there’s a lot of people going online at the same time. The Mario Tennis Aces Online demo didn’t do that at all since it was completely open through the whole weekend. It was also regional. This is completely different to when Nintendo did actually do stress tests with Splatoon, Splatoon 2, and ARMS.
With both Splatoon games and ARMS, Nintendo did the Test Fire and the Test Punch respectively. If you remember well, both of these were only available to play during select hours in certain days. This is what a stress test actually looks like because Nintendo tried to get the most amount of people to play during those specific hours.
I’m sure you’ll probably try to bring up the first Splatoon 2 Splatfest, which was open during a lot more time. (A whole day, IIRC) That one was not a stress test but, like the one from Mario Tennis Aces, an advertisement. It was intended to make people get interested in the Splatoon franchise and buy the sequel since a lot of people missed the original on Wii U. Nintendo wanted to increase the popularity of Splatoon with the players who have a Switch but never had a Wii U.
Mario Tennis Aces Online Tournament Demo was exactly the same thing. Before Mario Tennis Ultra Smash, the last Mario Tennis game on a home console was released quite a few years ago. The Wii didn’t have its own Mario Tennis game and only had the port of the GameCube one. And then there’s the fact that Mario Tennis Ultra Smash was rushed and wasn’t received well at all. This leaves us with a franchise name that is currently not looking so good and losing popularity fast. The Switch, though, is really popular and well viewed. So how do they recover the popularity and reception of people to the Mario Tennis franchise? Easy. By hyping the game as much as possible before release and then offering a free demo. Even if the demo is essentially offering pretty much the same content as Mario Tennis Ultra Smash, Nintendo has already hyped the game to the point that people will think the full game will be a lot more complete than Ultra Smash. So people will end up buying it, the popularity of the Mario Tennis franchise will increase again, and Nintendo has solved their issue of being able to sell a new Mario Tennis game.
Yes, it’s true that they that they did decide to release a patch later that fixes some of the connection issues, but that was later and released until the game’s release date. It means the patch was rushed, just like the game ended up being too. But Nintendo is pushing Camelot into making the game better since they want to use it for their eSports tourneys. The only feedback Nintendo got from the demo was mostly from an online survey sent to Japanese players (which I’m attaching below in case you are wondering about it). From the rest of the world, they didn’t really look into it much besides probably reading a few comments they received on their social network.
