Early tournaments are guaranteed to be entertaining. It's whether that entertainment can stick as the metagame evolves and if the way the metagame evolves is in a direction the spectators like over the course of the next year. With Brawl, it was entertaining for the first couple of months of watching youtube videos of tournament matches but then it started to wane really fast towards the end of the first year (at least for me). I found myself not really getting hype over the game anymore as a spectator because of the prominence of Meta Knight, Snake, Diddy Kong, etc etc. combined with the slower paced/defensive/poke-style gameplay that developed (not to mention all the ridiculously stupid and boring to watch tech people discovered in jab locks, grab release shenanigans, DDD chaingrabs, ICs chaingrabs, etc etc).
It also wasn't fun for me to play in them anymore so not only did I stop watching but I quit as a player (and I was even pretty decent, too).
