It will be a shame if (when) their miniatures business folds. GW has had some great mini designers over the years, and the social and creative parts of the hobby are extremely rewarding. I can understand their stance on wanting the hobby to be front and centre, there really is a lot of value there.
This purchase was most likely to make use of MLG's platform as a stable foundation for their own, foremost. There was a patent filed by Blizzard last year that involved a catch-all eSports platform that combined major event streaming with community-run end-user event planning/streaming and integration with Activision/Blizzard game clients (and I would assume services like Battle.net) which is a thing Blizzard game clients have been missing and players have been asking for. Instead of developing an in-client streaming service for each individual game they can use this kind of platform to give a similar event streaming experience to DotA2's in-client offering for all their games.
makari's comments