10 ms·

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

by nacs 10y ago

icehawk219 10y ago
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.
- Thaxll 10y ago
  Discord is probably too expensive / not for sale.
ben_jones 10y ago
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.
- detaro 10y ago
  With Microsoft buying Beam and Google maybe doing more with YouTube streaming, I'd say at least the streaming part of the market doesn't look like it will consolidate further, but rather split up more, away from only Twitch.
  - Scfix 10y ago
    I will be interested who comes out on top. You really have 3 large backend competing. AWS with Twitch. I would think Beam would be hosted on Azure and Google do its own thing. I am not sure how much traction google is going to get, from my knowledge twitch pays much better than google ads, per consumer.
  - Cogito 10y ago
    I hope that the market is able to support all of them, and we see robust competition. From what I can tell, streamers have no issue streaming on both twitch and youtube, and it mostly comes down to content restrictions as to which they use as their primary (twitch is fairly strict about streamers doing something 'creative', I think to avoid cam girl like activity).
SandersAK 10y ago
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.
- tgb 10y ago
  I'm not familiar with it, so how is discord a competitor to twitch? It looks like a newer TeamSpeak to me.
  - Macha 10y ago
    Are streamers hosting their chats on Discord as opposed to Twitch's chat system, which tends to break down after a certain level of activity? Only thing I can think of.
    - mc42 10y ago
      Full Disclosure: I really like Discord, and use Twitch daily. Discord has more easily manageable chat roles, eg: Moderator, Helper, Regular, Supporter, etc. Twitch chat is nothing more than simple IRC, and relies almost entirely on bots for the more complicated stuff. Discord also has voice chat built in, whereas Twitch has none for their chatters. Discord also has a better documented API and libraries in a lot of languages. Overall, Discord (despite using an electron app...) is simply a better chatting product.
      - jamie_ca 10y ago
        "despite being an electron app", I'm way happier using Discord than I am using either Hipchat or Skype. Discord is a really well-put-together app, has text and voice chat that do their jobs, and get out of the way. The only complaint I have is that there's little to no support for searching history, but for an app focusing on live "community" chats, that seems a reasonable compromise.
cocotino 10y ago
I don't even know what Curse is, but I use wowpedia every day, I hope they don't screw it up.
- icu 10y ago
  Curse hosts nearly every important WoW addon. If you are a raider or customize your UI the site is essential.
pfooti 10y ago
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.
- larzang 10y ago
  CKAN, the package manager for Kerbal Space Program mods, works by having a central metadata repo that they accept pull requests against for adding metadata for new mods, and then the mods themselves are hosted on Github or SpaceDock or wherever. It's not quite as automated as publishing a NPM or Composer package, but it's close and works well.
- Lazare 10y ago
  It's been many years now, but if memory serves... The precursor system to Curse was actually originally a shared SVN server a group of addon authors (called Wowace; still around somewhat) were using to collaborate on addon development. SVN checkouts were so convenient for distributing addons that the authors started using it to keep their own addons up to date, and then usage started to rapidly spread among "ordinary users". Unfortunately, the traffic every time a new patch came out absolutely smashed the server and generated enormous bandwidth bills. Various attempts to fund it via donations or sponsorship went nowhere. Curse had been knocking around in various forms for a while (I think they were a guild at one point, and already had a failed pivot to a "gaming community" behind them), but they rose to prominence by, basically, taking over the SVN server and finding ways to keep the lights on. Switching to github would be coming full circle in many ways. And it would have some advantages, but I'm not sure how happy github would be to act as a distribution network for addons. Note that 1.1 million clones and fetches in a week for the CocoaPods repo caused major strain: http://thenextweb.com/dd/2016/03/08/cocoapods-popular-basically-took-five-github-servers/#gref http://thenextweb.com/dd/2016/03/08/cocoapods-popular-basica... Using github as the backend for a Curse-clone would probably exceed that handily.
Blackthorn 10y ago
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.
- icu 10y ago
  I agree. I have been a loyal user of Curse for years but when they released their app I didn't see the value and didn't want to install an attack vector on my pc. I still go to Curse, sometimes several times a week but definitely it has become a worse experience over the years. As for Discord... my guild leader switched our raid team from Teamspeak and there was some acrimony because a guild member refused to install Discord as he felt strongly that it was a security threat and malware. I did try to substantiate these claims but couldn't find proof one way or the other. As a precaution I've resized my hard drive and installed a separate Windows for gaming and encrypted each partion separately to isolate Discord from my personal files. Several weeks into using Discord I think it is better than Teamspeak for overall features but in a raid situation with 20 on simultaneously the quality isn't as good as paying for a private Teamspeak server. Having said that though Discord is free and allows for a much richer experience so if they can sort out voice reliability and quality it will be a compelling proposition. I still have concerns as to the security of Discord as their website pretty much brushes over the topic but they do offer two factor for what it's worth... but I can't raid with my guild without it so I'm stuck using it.
  - selckin 10y ago
    What has curse done to cause this amount of distrust? (I assume you don't do this for every application you install)
    - icu 10y ago
      I only install applications from: a) vendors I trust b) confident in their security, and c) couldn't write the software myself. In the case of the Curse client I just wrote my own batch scripts and used cygwin. I could have just as easily done it in Python or AutoIt. As I wrote the software I know there is virtually no chance for malware. I can't be as certain about the Curse client. As far as I know it isn't open source. Maybe I'm more paranoid than most about security but it could be because I know how easily most systems are compromised.
antidamage 10y ago
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?
- SSLy 10y ago
  Curse has a not-bad generic mod client, but many games have homegrow utilities that blow it out of the water. Many MC launchers or ModOrganizer for Skyrim come first to mind.
- Nullabillity 10y ago
  > It's nice, works and doesn't cause problems. That's a bit of an overstatement. It's very slow and, like any ClickOnce application, is a pain to get working under Wine. Searching around there were apparently better tools, but Curse shut down their access. Imagine if GitHub were to stuff their desktop client full of ads and then require you to use that instead of the Git CLI. And if they do merge it with Curse Voice (as they claim to plan to) then I expect it will stop working entirely... For syncing/backups you can just symlink Interface/Addons and WTF to somewhere in Dropbox/Owncloud, no need for a specific application (and subscription) for that. Full disclosure: A few years ago I published an add-on on Curse and apparently I still have free premium ~80% of the year after that. I still use their client because they're the only game in town these days, sadly.

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

by nacs 10y ago

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

icehawk219 10y ago

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.

Thaxll 10y ago
Discord is probably too expensive / not for sale.

ben_jones 10y ago

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.

detaro 10y ago
With Microsoft buying Beam and Google maybe doing more with YouTube streaming, I'd say at least the streaming part of the market doesn't look like it will consolidate further, but rather split up more, away from only Twitch.
- Scfix 10y ago
  I will be interested who comes out on top. You really have 3 large backend competing. AWS with Twitch. I would think Beam would be hosted on Azure and Google do its own thing. I am not sure how much traction google is going to get, from my knowledge twitch pays much better than google ads, per consumer.
- Cogito 10y ago
  I hope that the market is able to support all of them, and we see robust competition. From what I can tell, streamers have no issue streaming on both twitch and youtube, and it mostly comes down to content restrictions as to which they use as their primary (twitch is fairly strict about streamers doing something 'creative', I think to avoid cam girl like activity).

SandersAK 10y ago

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.

tgb 10y ago
I'm not familiar with it, so how is discord a competitor to twitch? It looks like a newer TeamSpeak to me.
- Macha 10y ago
  Are streamers hosting their chats on Discord as opposed to Twitch's chat system, which tends to break down after a certain level of activity? Only thing I can think of.
  - mc42 10y ago
    Full Disclosure: I really like Discord, and use Twitch daily. Discord has more easily manageable chat roles, eg: Moderator, Helper, Regular, Supporter, etc. Twitch chat is nothing more than simple IRC, and relies almost entirely on bots for the more complicated stuff. Discord also has voice chat built in, whereas Twitch has none for their chatters. Discord also has a better documented API and libraries in a lot of languages. Overall, Discord (despite using an electron app...) is simply a better chatting product.
    - jamie_ca 10y ago
      "despite being an electron app", I'm way happier using Discord than I am using either Hipchat or Skype. Discord is a really well-put-together app, has text and voice chat that do their jobs, and get out of the way. The only complaint I have is that there's little to no support for searching history, but for an app focusing on live "community" chats, that seems a reasonable compromise.

cocotino 10y ago

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

icu 10y ago
Curse hosts nearly every important WoW addon. If you are a raider or customize your UI the site is essential.

pfooti 10y ago

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.

larzang 10y ago
CKAN, the package manager for Kerbal Space Program mods, works by having a central metadata repo that they accept pull requests against for adding metadata for new mods, and then the mods themselves are hosted on Github or SpaceDock or wherever. It's not quite as automated as publishing a NPM or Composer package, but it's close and works well.
Lazare 10y ago
It's been many years now, but if memory serves... The precursor system to Curse was actually originally a shared SVN server a group of addon authors (called Wowace; still around somewhat) were using to collaborate on addon development. SVN checkouts were so convenient for distributing addons that the authors started using it to keep their own addons up to date, and then usage started to rapidly spread among "ordinary users". Unfortunately, the traffic every time a new patch came out absolutely smashed the server and generated enormous bandwidth bills. Various attempts to fund it via donations or sponsorship went nowhere. Curse had been knocking around in various forms for a while (I think they were a guild at one point, and already had a failed pivot to a "gaming community" behind them), but they rose to prominence by, basically, taking over the SVN server and finding ways to keep the lights on. Switching to github would be coming full circle in many ways. And it would have some advantages, but I'm not sure how happy github would be to act as a distribution network for addons. Note that 1.1 million clones and fetches in a week for the CocoaPods repo caused major strain: http://thenextweb.com/dd/2016/03/08/cocoapods-popular-basically-took-five-github-servers/#gref http://thenextweb.com/dd/2016/03/08/cocoapods-popular-basica... Using github as the backend for a Curse-clone would probably exceed that handily.

Blackthorn 10y ago

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.

icu 10y ago
I agree. I have been a loyal user of Curse for years but when they released their app I didn't see the value and didn't want to install an attack vector on my pc. I still go to Curse, sometimes several times a week but definitely it has become a worse experience over the years. As for Discord... my guild leader switched our raid team from Teamspeak and there was some acrimony because a guild member refused to install Discord as he felt strongly that it was a security threat and malware. I did try to substantiate these claims but couldn't find proof one way or the other. As a precaution I've resized my hard drive and installed a separate Windows for gaming and encrypted each partion separately to isolate Discord from my personal files. Several weeks into using Discord I think it is better than Teamspeak for overall features but in a raid situation with 20 on simultaneously the quality isn't as good as paying for a private Teamspeak server. Having said that though Discord is free and allows for a much richer experience so if they can sort out voice reliability and quality it will be a compelling proposition. I still have concerns as to the security of Discord as their website pretty much brushes over the topic but they do offer two factor for what it's worth... but I can't raid with my guild without it so I'm stuck using it.
- selckin 10y ago
  What has curse done to cause this amount of distrust? (I assume you don't do this for every application you install)
  - icu 10y ago
    I only install applications from: a) vendors I trust b) confident in their security, and c) couldn't write the software myself. In the case of the Curse client I just wrote my own batch scripts and used cygwin. I could have just as easily done it in Python or AutoIt. As I wrote the software I know there is virtually no chance for malware. I can't be as certain about the Curse client. As far as I know it isn't open source. Maybe I'm more paranoid than most about security but it could be because I know how easily most systems are compromised.

antidamage 10y ago

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?

SSLy 10y ago
Curse has a not-bad generic mod client, but many games have homegrow utilities that blow it out of the water. Many MC launchers or ModOrganizer for Skyrim come first to mind.
Nullabillity 10y ago
> It's nice, works and doesn't cause problems. That's a bit of an overstatement. It's very slow and, like any ClickOnce application, is a pain to get working under Wine. Searching around there were apparently better tools, but Curse shut down their access. Imagine if GitHub were to stuff their desktop client full of ads and then require you to use that instead of the Git CLI. And if they do merge it with Curse Voice (as they claim to plan to) then I expect it will stop working entirely... For syncing/backups you can just symlink Interface/Addons and WTF to somewhere in Dropbox/Owncloud, no need for a specific application (and subscription) for that. Full disclosure: A few years ago I published an add-on on Curse and apparently I still have free premium ~80% of the year after that. I still use their client because they're the only game in town these days, sadly.