Twitch is acquiring popular video game community and software maker Curse

[nacs]

Curse is terrible. It's like the (current) Sourceforge of gaming sites. I seriously don't know why Twitch/Amazon would consider acquiring it.

[SandersAK]

Discord is starting to reveal their ability to pull streamer communities off of Twitch.

This is most likely a bulkhead acquisition to anticipate the growth of Discord and to try and keep those same streamers in the fold.

Twitch gets the massive community reach of Curse, plus they also get all the current momentum Curse has to be a Discord competitor.

It's a fantastic acquisition, if a little defensive.

[ben_jones]

Curse has tendrils in dozens if not hundreds of niche gaming sites, all with ravenously loyal fans with really high usage rates. When I was a kid I wanted to improve one of their data visualizations so I sent an admin an email about it and they never got back to me :-(.

Edit: I really hope their isn't a consolidation of gaming communities like Twitch is trying to do because it's only going to pander to the lowest common denominator, which in gaming tends to be absolutely cringeworthy.

[antidamage]

Because as far as I know it has the only useful mod management tool. It's nice, works and doesn't cause problems. Every time I come back to WoW, there's the Curse client, ready to help me get my mods and settings all sorted again. It has never failed me.

Are you able to say why you think Curse is terrible?

[pfooti]

the semi-irony here is their source-project management site for addon developers is called "curseforge".

I use curse mostly to handle addons for games I play a lot (world of warcraft primarily). Every now and then, when I bump into some terrible interface on their client or bad practice by their business managers, I have wondered how much work it would be to move to an open addon publication system. If you get all the addon authors to move to a different storage platform for their actual addons like github, how much extra work would it be to build a client on top of that? The addons themselves are pretty much FOSS by definition - you can't distribute for-pay addons for WoW at least.

I imagine there'd be some scale issues, and github isn't really a distro network, but I'd bet the technical work could be done in a weekend.

[icehawk219]

I've seen quite a few large streamers getting paid to switch off Discord and promote Curse's chat client. If anything that's probably what Twitch is after but I'd be curious why they didn't pick up Discord then since it seems to be more widely used.

[Blackthorn]

It wasn't always this way. Curse used to be a great boon for the community and held up a number of otherwise expensive to run sites.

[cocotino]

I don't even know what Curse is, but I use wowpedia every day, I hope they don't screw it up.

[Trisell]

Twitch is dying? They had 258k+ people watching The International. There were 130k watching an EULCS quarterfinal today. And those are just a couple of streams of the thousands that are online at any given time. Not to mention the popular streamers who have 10 of thousands of subs who pay $5+ a month which Twitch gets part of. Twitch is most definitely not "dying."

[elmigranto]

What you say is true, but "thousands that are online at any given time" doesn't accurately reflect what's going on. First of all, I would think most of streams are 0-10 viewers. Then we have people that stream to multiple services simultaneously (most programming streams do this and majority of people are not watching them on twitch).

[tantalor]

People pay $5+/mo to watch gamer streams? That can't be right.

Edit: Found an example, https://www.twitch.tv/products/leagueofgeeks/ticket

$5/mo for some random features and no ads, with "limited exceptions", so not actually ad-free. What are you paying for?

[goeric]

Discord will likely grow to the value of Twitch was at (when it was acquired by Amazon) in the next couple years, it's a really big space.

[xenihn]

I feel this way too. I was amazed at how much better Discord is in comparison to Ventrilo and Mumble when I first used it.

[niftich]

Previous; announcement from Twitch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12300381

[aurelius12]

Was this basically an acquihire? No price disclosed. I would be very surprised if this was any kind of successful acquisition, given Curse has taken $60m in funding.

[Aissen]

It seems like yesterday when Twitch was on the verge of closing down. Is it profitable yet ?

[neaumusic]

twitch web client sucks and breaks every time. discord > curse too. amazon is full of ego

[languagehacker]

That doesn't sound terribly promising for Wikia / Fandom.

[cloudjacker]

spend the money while it lasts!