Official logo.

start.gg, formerly known as smash.gg, is an application that provides tournament organizing tools for event organizers within the esports community. The application started as a website, which was launched in 2015, and features the ability to host registration, form a bracket, and create rankings amongst other things. In addition, its API is publicly accessible, making it easy for other databases, such as supermajor.gg, and applications to retrieve tournament information from the application with ease. The application was acquired by Microsoft on December 2nd, 2020 following a continued history of collaboration between the two,^[1] before going back to being independent on January 31st, 2025.^[2] On August 13th, 2026, start.gg evolved into an application, with a smartphone release on iOS and Android.^[3]

start.gg has been the most popular and widely-used platform for hosting Smash tournament information and brackets since the late-2010s, surpassing earlier alternatives such as Challonge, and as such is often considered the norm in the competitive scene. In spite of its popularity, the platform has received criticism, most notably for its perceived-poor infrastructure and performance and the lack of a proper mobile app for many years.

While the application initially only supported games within the Super Smash Bros. series, it has since then expanded to a plethora of other games with competitive scenes, eventually leading to its rebranding to "start.gg" on May 16th, 2022 to represent this expansion.^[4] Among the games featuring a competitive scene and being featured to events in the application, the list ranges from traditional fighting games, both 2D and 3D (Street Fighter, Tekken, Fatal Fury and its successor The King of Fighters, Virtua Fighter), to platform fighting games (Rivals of Aether, Fraymakers, MultiVersus), to other video game genres (Splatoon, Pokémon, Mario Kart, Mario Party), and lately Masahiro Sakurai's non-Super Smash Bros. games such as Kirby Air Ride and Kirby Air Riders.

Gallery

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  Logo from 2015-2022.

References

External links

• Website
• start.gg on App Store
• start.gg on Google Play
• Twitter
• Bluesky
• Discord server

• Websites
• Microsoft