Microsoft has acquired the esports organization tool Smash.GG, according to an announcement by MSN’s new esports hub. Smash.GG confirmed the acquisition with a small blurb on its front page.
Smash.GG bills itself as a self-service esports platform, offered as a free service to the owners and organizers behind gaming tournaments worldwide. It offers an easy way for fans and players to find, enter, and follow gaming competitions, along with software that automatically generates competitive brackets.
While it’s most strongly associated with head-to-head tournament fighters like Street Fighter and Super Smash Bros., as its name would suggest, Smash.GG also provides services for games in other genres, such as Rocket League, Fortnite, Valorant, and the mobile card battler Yu-Gi-Oh Duel Links. It’s been used for everything from local get-togethers to major international competitions, and currently claims to support over 6,000 active events.
Founded in 2015, Smash.GG bills itself as the product of a small team of anonymous esports fans who wanted to build more active communities around their favorite games. The actual site keeps most of its details under wraps, but per Smash.GG’s entry on CrunchBase, it’s a private company with four team members that operates out of San Francisco.
Reportedly, as far as anyone outside of Smash.GG is concerned, the acquisition won’t change anything. Smash.GG will retain the same team, branding, and software as before.
Big news everyone! @smashgg is joining us at Microsoft. Same great tournament organization features. Same amazing team. Even more support and opportunities. Get ready to play!
— MSN Esports (@MSN_Esports) December 2, 2020
It’s worth noting that the announcement from Microsoft about the acquisition came via MSN, rather than from anywhere within the Xbox department. (At time of writing, the Xbox team has not publicly acknowledged the acquisition at all.) MSN opened a new esports hub on its main site in October, which currently serves as a useful filter for finding particular games’ coverage on Twitch.
It may simply be that Smash.GG will be folded into the service as a way to enhance the functionality of MSN’s new hub. It’s probably easier to cover the notoriously chaotic esports scene when a big chunk of its overall organization goes straight through Microsoft-owned software.
This is also easy to see as a move by Microsoft to revive the flagging pro leagues for the Halo community, in advance of Infinite‘s release at some point in 2021. One of the big reasons why the Call of Duty franchise is so popular is its well-managed competitive circuit, and it’d be a natural move by Microsoft to try to replicate that with Infinite. Preemptively gaining control of one of the best-known tools for tournament organizers, especially if Microsoft produces something like an integrated Smash.GG app for the Xbox Series X, would give Halo fans a natural step up once it’s time to start setting up their local competitions.
Finally, Microsoft buying Smash.GG does give a shot in the arm to the international fighting game community, which still makes up most of the activity on Smash.GG’s front page. Even if Microsoft doesn’t plan to actually produce another fighting game in the near future, such as a sequel to its 2013 cult hit Killer Instinct, it’s now in control of one of the fighting game community’s most popular tools for setting up its tournaments.
