#SmashBrosUltimate - Smash Bros for Switch.

[Kriven]

Licensing is going to be a bitch however.

Licensing for Goku shouldn't be too difficult. Namco owns the video game license to the Dragon Ball (and Naruto) franchise, and Namco is working on Smash, and Namco and Nintendo are on very good terms with one another. Getting Goku into Smash wouldn't even be an eighth of the nightmare that would be actually localizing Jump Super Stars.

So for the rights as a videogame character, Namco is all they have to worry about? I always thought he was stuck to a bunch of license holders, both in Japan and in the West.

Shueisha might have a certain amount of say in how the product is ultimately used, but Namco has more control over the aspects of the IP they're licensed to use than people might think. There's probably another company or two in the West who has a certain amount of control over localized depictions of the character, but it's important to note that Dragon Ball games which aren't crossover titles don't usually have trouble making it to the west. Namco has an in with the companies they work with, and I don't think that for the inclusion of Dragon Ball or Naruto characters you would see the huge clusterfuck people like to imagine when they think about other Jump crossover games. Usually that clusterfuck isn't even a matter of English localization companies fighting, but the fact that Namco owns the license for one franchise in the west, but Sega owns the license for Bleach, and Konami might own the license for Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, and Koei Tecmo might own One Piece. The rights issues that cause problems are when competing game publishers own rights to the characters required for a crossover effort. Usually--in the case of manga--not because Viz and Funimation don't want the game to happen. I also think the fact that JStars Victory Vs. managed to get an official English release indicates that a certain amount of "smoothing out" has happened regarding characters published in Shonen Jump.

Edit: I forgot to add that often with licensed games, a studio is licensed for a set period of time or for a certain number of games, or even only to do one game and then the license reverts back to Shueisha. Namco has held onto the DBZ and Naruto properties for a significant amount of time, and they publish games within those franchises much more regularly than you see a lot of other manga games getting published. I of course don't have the contracts laid out in front of me, but the fact that even the games they didn't develop (Xenoverse and Fighter Z) were still published by Namco, the fact they've held the franchises for so long, and the fact that they produce sequels, side games, and sometimes even crossovers with their own properties (like Tekken), all indicate to me that Namco has a sweeter deal with those properties than you typically see in licensed games.