Kind of timely with that Oomba piece. I'm a bit surprised though, this seems like a site MS could build in under a year and Smash.gg doesn't have much traction in the major esports AFAIK. Also, I assumed Mixer shutting down was MS stepping away from esports.
Agreed, my first thought was "but they just sold Mixer". Doesn't make much sense to me.
and shutting down mixer was a mistake. also they should've just grown mixer slowly and made it more accessible, it could've been a good twitch alternative..
MS is like Google. If they don't have instant success they give up.
Granted, 3 months in the pandemic and you get less than 1% growth after a big budget launch? Yeah, I’d kill it too.
Huh, this is pretty interesting. I'm not really familiar with Smash.gg, but if what people in this thread are saying is true, that it's a fairly straightforward platform that could be easily reproduced by Microsoft, then it seems like this acquisition was almost altruistically motivated. It feels like it's easy for a lot of big companies to make better competing products and drive the little guy into extinction, but this acqusition move feels like the company encourages startups and isn't entirely motivated by greed. But I may be biased; I already do like Microsoft, Nadella, and what the company does and how far it has come since the Ballmer days.
Buying platforms has nothing to do with the software. It's always about the user data.
And MS didn't get better since Ballmer. Killing platforms and snooping on their users. Just look at the productivity score in O365.
Unless there's some hidden complexity to this site.. it looks fairly straight forward. Why have MS bought it?
I'd say since smash.gg is already the established method of organizing esports events across a variety of game communities, despite being straight forward.
Same reason behind most tech acquisitions: the users
or the team
here is the series A announcement from 2017, with some interesting VCs participating