While the tour was partnered with Twitch and the fighting game website start.gg, it had not waited to partner with Nintendo, which The Washington Post deemed to have "mired past attempts" at creating prominent Super Smash Bros. circuits; however, the organizers were having active discussions with Nintendo—Wykowski said that the team's "goal was to go ahead and create something that then [can be presented] to Nintendo as an opportunity to be able to work with the Smash community directly".

[1] However, the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic led the Smash World Tour to cancel all of its major events for March and April 2020 mid-March, and eventually all events for the rest of the year; only two relatively small tournaments took place before the cancellation, the 86-entrants Don't Stomp On Me and the 39-entrants SoCal The Hype, both on March 14, 2020.

[4] The switch from the original system making independent tournaments part of the tour via a point system to a series of events dedicated solely to the circuit where offline tournaments would have a limited number of players, took place in order to make the event possible in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, although the organizers hoped to resume using the 2020 format the following year.

[17] Platinum and Gold events, the highest tier ratings for the tour, took place in countries whose Super Smash Bros. scenes usually receive little attention internationally, such as Brazil, Cuba, Qatar, and South Korea.

Smash World Tour accused Alan Bunney, then-CEO of the esports organization Panda, of encouraging tournament organizers to join the Panda Cup—an officially licensed circuit run by Panda—rather than the Smash World Tour, and using his partnership with Nintendo to threaten others with a cease and desist order should they not comply.

[27] After a request for comment from Kotaku, Nintendo responded, saying they "were unable to come to an agreement" with the Smash World Tour for a license in 2023, though Nintendo "did not request any changes to or cancellation of remaining events in 2022, including the 2022 Championships event, considering the negative impact on the players who were already planning to participate".

[30] According to Smash World Tour, Nintendo claimed that a license be granted "well in advance" of a public announcement in order for commercial events to be operated featuring Nintendo's intellectual property, and that the Smash World Tour had failed both health and safety guidelines and "internal partner guidelines", meaning Nintendo would be unable to grant a license for any upcoming Smash World Tour activity.

[31] Smash World Tour stated that the timeline of Nintendo's actions were illogical if they intended to allow the Championships proceed.

They also denyed most of the accusations against Bunney, though they acknowledged that the dispute between him and Beyond the Summit did occur, and that he "spoke in a manner that did not reflect either guidance from Nintendo or our own standards".

[34][35][36] SWT's original announcement led to strong backlash and condemnation from both Super Smash Bros. players and fans towards both Bunney and Nintendo, with many calling for a boycott of Panda events.

[37][38] On the same day as the SWT statement, VGBootCamp, one of the main organizations behind the Smash World Tour, announced that "based on our recent communications with Nintendo, we would be putting ourselves at further risk if we continued forward with our current plans", that they were unsure of the future of their company due to these communications, and were forced to cancel the upcoming major tournaments Glitch: Duel of Fates and Double Down 2023, leading to further backlash against Nintendo.

"[41] Player and tournament organizer Aiden "Calvin" McCaig claimed that he would not attend any future event licensed by either Nintendo or Panda in the future, accusing Nintendo of using Panda as "a means to the end of controlling the scene, choking our last drops of independence from us as a community.

[43][34] Bunney's claim in December 5 that he would come forward with evidence of wrongdoing from both SWT and BTS was largely mocked by the community.

[35] Those departures included top Super Smash Bros. players iBDW, Plup and WaDi, and prominent commentators Coney, TKBreezy and VikkiKitty.

As the tour was fully focused on traditional singles competition, results for doubles tournaments or other forms of Super Smash Bros. competition featured at events part of the Smash World Tour had no impact on points, and only open tournaments were eligible, ruling out invitationals.

[46] The confirmation of the players qualified for the Smash World Championships in late November 2022 led to some controversy, as, unlike they had claimed in their original ruleset, the organizers counted points for tournaments players had entered but DQ'd from without actually participating; when the discrepancy was pointed out, the organizers added a clause to the rules stating they could count DQs at their discretion.

Each tournament had eight final entrants joining via the Last Chance Qualifier, making the total number of participants in the Championship 40, instead of 32 like the other years.