Hello. I new here and have questions about Smogon and Pokemon Showdown themselves.
1.
What exactly is Smogon? Is it just a Pokemon battling standards body and nothing else?
2.
What is the relationship between Smogon and Pokemon Showdown? Could Pokemon Showdown realistically exist without Smogon and vice versa?
3.
Are there any competitors to Smogon? Surely in the past the battling scene had many competing standards bodies, but what about today?
4.
Are there any competitors to Pokemon Showdown? If not, what factors drive the addition of new features into the simulator?
5.
Does Pokemon Showdown have any legal issues? With Nintendo's iron rule over its IPs it seems odd that PS can even exist.
Hello, and welcome! I'll try and answer these as best as I can, but I wasn't around for much of the applicable history, so if I make a mistake or someone wants to elaborate, by all means anyone hop in.
1. Smogon's a bunch of things. Besides battling standards, it's a place to write publish competitive content for the public, discuss and tutor on the metagames from those standards, host tournaments, talk about Pokemon more casually, and make art and articles for competitive and casual Pokemon, among other things. Via Discord (and Showdown if you think about it), it also indirectly hosts live chats on all sorts of topics.
2/4. These questions kind of overlap. Over the years, the primary simulator of Smogon and other competitive Pokemon fans has changed. Pokemon Battle Simulator / Porygon's Big Show and Shoddy Battle come to mind; only the most veteran users on this site remember Shoddy's heyday, I imagine. Then came Pokemon Online, which is the closest thing I'd call to a Showdown competitor I can think of. It's extremely much smaller than PS, though.
In the ancient Pokemon Online days of 2011, Zarel (then using the handle 'aesoft') created Showdown as a competitor to PO that was closer integrated with Smogon. Showdown is Smogon's official battling and tournament simulator, but the integration goes deeper: besides Showdown being made by a Smogon badged user, it is co-owned by chaos (the owner of Smogon), and its staff and user communities overlap greatly (though certainly not fully).
These days, with no need to compete with PO, Showdown keeps improving for the same reason Smogon keeps releasing analyses and articles: a wonderful team of behind-the-scenes specialists volunteer out of a shared desire to improve the platform and respond to community desires.
If PS and Smogon were inexplicably split somehow, Smogon would likely find/use/create a different simulator, like in the PO days, while PS would maintain much of its existing community and PS-specific or not-really-rules-determined formats like Random Battle, Challenge Cup, (Natdex) Anything Goes, Custom Game, etc.
3.
Pokemon Perfect is the closest thing to come to mind. However, it is vastly smaller: I hopped on, and, while there was a post in the last 24 hours, there were no online users.
Serebii is an active xenforo Pokemon discussion forum, but since they have less competitive focus than us, I see them more as a complement and less as a competitor. While not functionally active at this time,
Azure Heights, home of Porygon's Big Show, is a great place to see the history of competitive pokemon.
5. This one's a bit above my paygrade, but from being around the sim a long time, staffing it, and talking to admins, here is Some Things Of Uncertain Importance That Might Interest You.
Showdown is a super valuable resource for the community of VGC, Pokemon's official battling format. It the best place for VGC players to test and play without slowly creating legal competitive-ready Pokemon in-game: a lot of official-event-competing-and-winning VGC players would be real mad if PS got aggression. Also, they'd be more pressured to hack Pokemon in to test different teams and strategies without spending 36 hours a day getting competitive-ready Pokemon, and we know Gamefreak has no love for hacking.
Showdown is less a competitor to the actual games than you might think. We don't offer a campaign mode or unique characters/music/cutscenesetc., and Gamefreak themselves have cared less and less about beyond-campaign battling (what PS does) in the games themselves: just look at the decline in battle facilities after Gen 5. In fact, since we are free, we're an outlet to familiarize yourself and fall in love with the Pokemon and mechanics, which may convince people to buy actual Pokemon games who wouldn't otherwise.
We license music from them, which shows that us and them are ok sitting at the Business Table™ with each other and doing IP business.
Hope this helps
