Microsoft offers prizes at almost every one of these events for teams using Azure. If the team isn't especially invested in one platform or another, the prize availability will decide for them.

Their prizes are pretty good too. A few friends of mine won specced out Surface Pro 3's for a really crappy Android app.

@yodon - yep, surprised us too at first. But MS had a very strong hackathon sponsorship campaign last season (mentors, prizes, etc.) and that really does move the needle.

I was surprised to see Venmo as top payment API. I guess I am out of the loop as I have never heard of it. I expected to see Stripe at the top of that list.

This was what surprised me... I thought the order would have been Stripe, Paypal...

OP here. IMO, I think the reason Venmo trumps is because it's P2P payments rather than for retail / enterprise. Most of the hacks using Venmo are about tipping your friends or discouraging bad behavior, etc.

Plus, Braintree / Venmo are frequent sponsors.

There should be some asterisk or something next to tech that is a frequent sponsor. That influence severely distorts the conclusions. If we're discussion auto racing and Hyundai was giving out free cars, then would that mean that Hyundai was the best race car because everyone was using it? The intent of this study isn't to see how effective contest sponsorship is, it's to get an idea of popular technologies. Sponsorship non-disclosure paints an inaccurate picture. i.e. Azure being so popular when in the real word, it isn't.

Absolutely this. Sponsorship information completely changes the picture.

Its my understanding that Azure is slightly better for students. Their Dreamspark offering, at least when I looked at it, was better if you got started in the first couple years of school.

Unity3d is almost certainly leading because of all of the oculus sponsorships.

I think it's more likely because Unity has been targeting the smaller dev market since it began, while Unreal only seriously started targeting that market earlier this year with its free version.

I dont know anything about Unity or Unreal but can't you do Unity stuff in JS? Perhaps that has something to do with it too?