Super Smash Bros. 4 Official Site

The official website for Super Smash Bros. 4 launched on June 11, 2013, shortly after the two games' E3 2013 trailer. Like its predecessors, Smabura-Ken and the, it was periodically updated with information on the games, but unlike its predecessors, the information was shown mostly through pictures instead of text. For a short time after a character was revealed, their image links would have an "UPDATE" banner affixed.

The website gives information about all of the characters and shows videos and images in both Wii U and Nintendo 3DS versions. On the main page, there is a picture that was changed every weekday. This picture was the most recent "pic of the day", which was also posted by Masahiro Sakurai in the Miiverse community called the Director's Room, where he started providing captions and sometimes additional pictures starting July 2013.

Overview
The language selection offered by the site includes English, Japanese, German, French, Italian and Spanish, like its predecessor Smash Bros. DOJO!!, in addition to the newly-added Portuguese, Dutch and Russian. For some languages, regional variations are available.

When a character was revealed, a banner under the daily photo that said "Warning! Challenger Approaching!" (a reference to the message that typically appears whenever unlockable characters are first encountered within a Super Smash Bros. game) was added. It remained there for a couple of days. The amount of time the banner stays up seemed to be dependent on how soon the next character would be revealed, though there was an approximate maximum and minimum timeframe.

Over time, the website was gradually fleshed out, later including Nintendo 3DS informational manuals about character movesets (Japanese version), as well as additional information regarding Pokémon, Assist Trophies, and music previews.

Character pages
Each character confirmed for Super Smash Bros. 4 has their own character page. These pages can be accessed by clicking on the picture displaying the fighter on the website's front page. Each character page contains the characters' official render within a frame displaying their name, and ten additional photos. These pictures will be a mixture of Wii U and 3DS screenshots—there are typically more from the Wii U—and the Wii U pictures always precede the 3DS pictures. The background color of the page changes according to character. When applicable, these character pages will sometimes link to a recent or then-upcoming Nintendo game featuring the character. On special characters, such as newcomers and third-party fighters, there would often be a bonus video or piece of artwork alongside the main character render.

Unlike the website's predecessors, the and Smabura-Ken, there is no additional text on the page regarding the character, except for, whose page explains the system for his Street Fighter-style inputs.

Fighter Ballot


On April 1, 2015, the website was updated to include a new section titled Smash Bros. Fighter Ballot. The purpose of this ballot was for regular players outside the development team to have an input on what characters should be released as DLC. Upon entering the site, the voter is given four tasks. The first is to identify their gender - male or female - then the character, their game of origin, and a brief explanation as to why the character should be included. This final section has a 500 character limit. Once every section is filled out, the voter presses the large confirm button, where the vote is submitted to a database. There is no limit to the amount of times a single person can vote, although only a single vote per person was considered valid and effected the results of the ballot. This ballot was live until October 3, 2015, where it was closed and removed from the website. Around 1.8 million valid votes were then tallied, and a winner was decided.

During the Final Video Presentation on December 15, 2015, was declared as the winner of the ballot. She was the #1 choice in Europe and in the top 5 in North America. She was also the #1 choice among "realizable and negotiable" characters, which was the real deciding factor. Bayonetta was released as the final Smash 4 DLC fighter on February 3, 2016. The game was later datamined in June 2018, and the dataminers discovered evidence that parameters for Bayonetta were added to the game as early as version 1.0.6 on April 15, 2015, only two weeks after the ballot went live, despite not actually releasing until nearly ten months later with version 1.1.5. This information suggests that Bayonetta had already been decided as a character before the ballot ended.

Masahiro Sakurai would later confirm that the results were used to determine new characters in future installments of the series. Several popular characters from the Fighter Ballot were introduced as fighters in Ultimate, such as, , , , , , and. The overall winner of the ballot was revealed to be during Sakurai's Presentation for the character.

Trivia

 * On the character image links, all names are written in capital letters, as in the game, with the exceptions of the Wii Fit Trainer and Mii Fighter, whose names appear as "Wii Fit TRAINER" and "Mii FIGHTER". Bowser Jr., Mr. Game & Watch, and Dr. Mario additionally follows this rule, but only on the Japanese site ("KOOPA Jr.", "Mr. GAME & WATCH", and "Dr. MARIO").
 * On the English website, despite certain characters receiving their English-localization names for their respective URL addresses (such as Mega Man being referred to as "Mega Man" within his page's URL address, rather than his Japanese name of "Rockman"), the English URL addresses for the character webpages of, , , , and still incorporate their Japanese names as of December 2015 (Rosetta, Lizardon, Gekkouga, Reflet, and Kamui respectively).
 * Ryu's "Challenger Approaching" image on the official website read "Here Comes A New Challenger!" instead of the usual "Warning! Challenger Approaching!", a reference to the classic tagline played when the arcade single-player mode in Street Fighter II is interrupted by another player's joining. Interestingly, this is done in English even on the Japanese site, where the character's Japanese name followed by "" is normally used.
 * Prior to the international release of, characters new to the  series had a much larger feature on the website's main page, which included their series symbol, "NEWCOMER" and an additional image. However, this did not apply to Lucina on the desktop version of the site.
 * Robin is the only character on the site whose official art incorporates both female and male versions together.
 * In the version of the website after the international release, the first ten characters listed are ten of the original twelve (excluding Ness and Jigglypuff, who are located on the page for secret characters). The default characters are listed in the order that they are located on the character selection screen, which is the order in which they were introduced, with Luigi and Captain Falcon following Pikachu.
 * Despite the fact that was revealed before Robin, as well as her trophy and Mystery Mushroom costume from Super Mario Maker being listed before his, her page on the website is listed after his.
 * Disregarding the first two Smash sites, which had no music, the Smash 4 site has the least available music, at 13 tracks.