Amazon.com, Inc. seems to be diving deeper into the video gaming industry as its Twitch subsidiary — the online live video streaming platform where gamers broadcast their plays — has made an interesting acquisition. Twitch is doubling down on gaming and has jacked up a major player in the realm of video game communities, i.e. Curse. While the deal has been officially announced, the terms and details have not been disclosed yet.
With over 30 million unique users a month, Curse is one of the world’s largest platforms for video game communication and information. It operates a slate myriad of services and websites, most of which were acquired over the years while some were developed in-house. Since its inception, Curse’s aim has been to empower gamers in all possible aspects of their gaming lifestyles. Gamers rely on Curse for their MCN Union, interactive communities, extensive databases, voice communications optimized for gaming, handling mods for different games, and for the latest information and news in the gaming world.
In 2006, the company started off with the launch of a website that offered mods and other sorts of assistance for the once widely popular, World of Warcraft. The game is well beyond its peak and Curse has since built new communities and platforms with huge audiences for new video games. For example, the company manages guide websites and database on NFL games, World of Warcraft, and League of Legends. It also operates news sites for various video games and many different forums around Pokemon, Minecraft, Hearthstone, and Diablo III as well as all GamePedia wiki pages that all bring in high volumes of traffic. Comprehensive mod databases for various games still exist.
Additionally, the company recently introduced a computer-only product, simply named Curse. This is essentially a platform where gamers can contact their online friends and play together. It is a direct competitor of one of the many similar platforms, TeamSpeak. The product Curse integrates a chat feature that allows chatting between team members, VoIP tools to coordinate with teammates while playing, and streaming features that make streaming on YouTube Gaming or Twitch more efficient and easier.
Evidently, acquiring Curse will bring in quite a few new properties and audiences for Twitch. Integrating the acquired technologies into its own platform will give the e-commerce giant’s video gaming arm an edge over its competitors. Twitch could use parts of Curse’s properties such as Curse to build an in-house broadcasting solution rather than telling users to install third-party software, which they currently do.
Twitch will inherit huge video game audiences, engaging communities, and people that can manage those userbases and platforms. Online watchers and streamer communities are Twitch’s bread and butter, thus this would bring in more business for the Amazon subsidiary.
Twitch and Curse both have a similar niche market, which is why this acquisition is a good move for the former. Curse doesn’t compete with news platforms for mainstream games; instead it focuses on competitive online games. A look at some of the most popular games on Twitch, including League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, Overwatch, and Counter Strike, will show the overlap between the video game streaming site and Curse communities.