If you’ve been sleeping on Microsoft recently within the PC gaming scene, they’ve been absolutely slaying it left, right, and center on all accounts.
The Xbox Game Pass For PC is arguably one of the best deals in gaming at the moment, bar nothing, and it’s difficult not to side with the subscription service for, if nothing else, the sheer value that they’re readily offering subscribers.
It’s to the point that you see it smattered across a plethora of gaming forums online, and some people have even taken to calling it an advertising ploy akin to the 2016 election with astroturfing: pseudo-users hired to pretend to hold certain ideas that manage to coincide with whatever form of arsenic is being sold by whatever organization.
Truth be told, it’s a pretty big deal, and it is easily bigger than the PlayStation Now service that suffers monumentally from streaming that results in input lag, making many games on the service almost unplayable unless you have the patience of a saint.
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It looks like Microsoft isn’t done raining blows just yet, either: Smash.gg announced on Twitter that they’ve been acquired by the juggernaut.
Smash.gg, for the uninitiated, is a platform that offers tournament organizers (TOs) a plethora of tools to help run and publish tournaments, ranging from payments necessary to teams and staff to organizing brackets and dates.
Imagining this in the hands of Microsoft, who are the quintessential royalty of productivity software with tools such as Excel and Word becoming household names that people interact with starting at an ever-younger age. The power of Microsoft behind one of the largest TO tools for the future is a massive blow to Nintendo and PlayStation both, as they both hold titles that continue to hold tournaments.
Worth noting that, as the name Smash.gg implies, the tool has been used extensively by the Smash community; this buyout during a time of turmoil for Super Smash players that are frustrated that Nintendo cracked down on the usage of emulators for online play during the pandemic seems to be interesting at the least.
With this comes a caveat, however: if Microsoft one day decides, however unlikely, that the gaming industry isn’t for them, a lot of names are going to be left at a standstill. Perhaps more concerning, and far more likely, is that Microsoft will begin playing the exclusives keep-away garbage that many other platforms continue to embroil themselves in which would damage TOs and the scene as a whole.
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The best-case scenario here is that Microsoft uses its decided level of expertise in productivity suites to make Smash.gg the quintessential TO tool for every esport, strengthening esports as a whole while cementing their name as a company that is interested in the health and validity of an industry.