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.
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…
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.